One of the things
she knew best was that the girl was a child. She was not a child
herself, and she was an abjectly bitter and wretched creature who
had no reason for hope. She lived in small lodgings in a street
off Abbey Road, and, in a drawer in her dressing table, she kept
hidden a photograph of a Prussian officer with cropped blond head,
and handsome prominent blue eyes, arrogantly gazing from beneath
heavy lids which drooped. He was of the type the German woman, young
and slim, or mature and stout, privately worships as a god whose
relation to any woman can only be that of a modern Jove stooping
to command service. In his teens he had become accustomed to the
female eye which lifts itself adoringly or casts the furtively
excited glance of admiration or appeal. It was the way of mere
nature that it should be so--the wise provision of a masculine
God, whose world was created for the supply and pleasure of males,
especially males of the Prussian Army, whose fixed intention it
was to dominate the world and teach it obedience.
To such a man, so thoroughly well trained in the comprehension of
the power of his own rank and values, a young woman such as Fraulein
Hirsch--subservient and without beauty--was an unconsidered object
to be as little regarded as the pavement upon which one walks. The
pavement had its uses, and such women had theirs. They could, at
least, obey the orders of those Heaven had placed above them, and,
if they showed docility and intelligence, might be re warded by a
certain degree of approval.
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