When I met her she was living in Munich from choice, like so
many other Germans who were bored with routine and rigid class lines.
She was a beautiful young woman, with dark hair and eyes and a brilliant
complexion, and dressed to perfection, although she wore no stays. This
may have been a bit of vanity on her part, as the awful reformkleid was
in vogue, and fat German women were displaying themselves in lumps and
creases and billows and sections that rolled like the untrammelled waves
of the sea. Her own figure was so firmly molded and so erect and supple
that it was, for all her fashionable clothes, quite independent of the
corset. She had charming manners combined with an imperturbable
serenity, and always seemed faintly amused. On the other hand, she
displayed none of the offensive German conceit and arrogance.
We spent several days together at Partenkirchen, one of the most
picturesque spots in the Bavarian Alps, and as we were both good
walkers, and there was no one else in the hotel who interested us, we
became quite intimate. She was one of the first to talk to me about the
deep discontent and disgust of the German women, and of her own utter
contempt for the meek hausfrau type, and for the tyrannies, petty,
coarse, often brutal, of the man in his home. Nothing, she was
determined, would ever tempt her to marry, and she could name many
others who were making an independent life for themselves, although,
lacking fortune, often in secret.
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