I had an apartment for seven years in Munich and spent six or eight
months alternately in that delightful city and traveling in Europe,
passing a month or two in England, or returning for an equal length of
time to my own country. During that long residence in Germany I
naturally met many of its inhabitants, and of as many classes as
possible. German women do not tell you the history of their lives the
first time you meet them, not by any means; they are naturally secretive
and the reverse of frank. But they are human, and when you have won
their confidence they will tell you surprising things. The confidences I
received were for the most part from girls, and one and all assured me
they never should marry. Having grown up under one House Tyrant, for
whom they were not responsible, why in heaven's name should they
deliberately annex another? Far, far better bear with the one whose
worst at least they knew (and who could not live forever), than marry
some man who might be loathsome as well as tyrannical, and who, unless
there happened to be a war, might outlive them?
The idea in my novel of the four Niebuhr girls and their initial
rebellion was suggested to me by a family of Prussian junkerdom that I
met at a watering place in Denmark. The baroness was a charming woman
who used a moderate invalidism in a smiling imperturbable fashion to
insure herself a certain immunity from the demands of her autocratic
lord.
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