.
But in a moment these vagrant fancies, drifting from a tired brain, took
flight, her reluctant mind focused itself, and she knelt beside the
bier, pressing the folds of the cloak about her face and weeping
heavily.
It was her final tribute to her womanhood. That she had rescued her
country and incidentally the world, making democracy and liberty safe
for the first time in its history, mattered nothing to her then. Nor her
immortal fame.
To regret was impossible. Strong souls are inaccessible to regret. But
she hated life and her bitter destiny, for she had sacrificed the life
that gave meaning to her own, and she wished that the implacable Powers
that rule the destinies of individuals and nations had foreborne their
accustomed irony and presented her gifts to some woman mercifully
lacking her own terrible power to love and suffer--and the imagination
which would keep for ever vivid in her mind the poignant happiness that
had been hers and that she had immolated on the cold altar of duty. She
was still young, and her sole hope, glimmering at the end of an
interminable perspective, was that it would be her privilege to lie at
last in the grave with this man; who had been her other part and whose
heart and hers she had slain.
THE WOMEN OF GERMANY
An Argument for my "The White Morning"
From _The Bookman_, February, 1918,
by courtesy of Dodd, Mead & Co.
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