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Don't ask me for opinions, however; content yourself with a few facts and with an anecdote. Madame Blumenthal is Prussian, and very well born. I remember her mother, an old Westphalian Grafin, with principles marshalled out like Frederick the Great's grenadiers.
The Grafin was shaken out of her calm into exclamations of joy and fear, joy that the step had been taken, fear lest Russia should obey, and there be no war after all. We had to shut the windows to be able to hear ourselves talk.
"I wish the band would strike up an air," said the Grafin von Tolb fretfully; "it is stupid waiting here in silence." Joan fingered her watch, but she made no further remark; she realised that no amount of malicious comment could be so dramatically effective now as the slow slipping away of the intolerable seconds. The murmur from the crowd grew in volume.
But he had a very considerable respect for Herr Doktor Meyers a rank plebeian but the best doctor in Berlin and when that family adviser, as autocratic as himself, ordered the Frau Gräfin to go to a sanatorium in the Austrian Dolomites but alone, mind you! and remain as long as he I, myself, Herr Graf! deemed advisable, with no intercourse, personal or chirographical with her family, the Head of the House of Niebuhr angrily gave his consent and sent for a sister to chaperon his girls.
Out of hearing, Gräfin von Stachelberg who, however, to facilitate intercourse, begged Vivie to call her "Minna," "We may all be dead, my dear, before long of blood-poisoning, bombs from your aeroplanes, a rising against us in the Marolles quarter " said very plainly what she thought of Edith Cavell's execution.
Wouldn't it have been too awful if they had been men! Koseritz, Saturday, July 25th, 1914. You know, my beloved one, I'd much rather be at Frau Berg's in Berlin and independent, and able to see Bernd whenever he can come, without saying dozens of thank you's and may I's to anybody each time, and I had arranged to go today, and now the Grafin won't let me.
"Dear child," she said, "you cannot suppose that our ally, the Kaiser's ally, would make demands that are not just?" "Do you think Friday's papers are still anywhere about?" was my answer. "I'd like to read the Austrian note, and think it over for myself. I haven't yet." The Grafin smiled at this, and rang the bell. "I expect Dorner" Dorner is the butler "has them," she said.
How funny that room at Frau Berg's will look and feel after being here. But I don't mind going back to it one little half a scrap. Bernd will be in Berlin; he'll be writing to me, seeing me, walking with me. With him there it will be, every bit of it, perfect. "When I come back to town in October," the Grafin said to me, "you must stay with us.
The cake was still under discussion, and the Grafin had just admitted that it was almost as good as that other cake which had been consumed in the days of Frederick the Great, when the servant called Desiree from the room. "It is a soldier," she said in a whisper at the head of the stairs. "He has a paper in his hand. I know what that means. He is quartered on us." Desiree hurried downstairs.
"This means war," he said, and the Grafin said, "Hush," very quickly; I suppose because she couldn't bear to hear the word. Then she got up too, and went after the Graf, and we were left, Helena and the governess, and the children, and Bernd, and I at a confused and untidy table, everybody with a question in their eyes, and the servants' hands not very steady as they held the dishes.
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