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Such is the perverseness of the feminine nature, even in Morovenia. About the time that Mr. Pike arrived in Vienna, and after Kalora had been in voluntary retirement for some forty-eight hours, the famous Koldo, head of the secret police, came into possession of a most important clue.
But he did not come, and she went to her state-room and tried to forget him, and to think of something other than the reception awaiting her back in the dismal region known as Morovenia. The Governor-General waited in the main reception-room for the truant expedition. He was hoping against hope.
If the father was worried by the prolonged crisis, the younger sister, Jeneka, was well-nigh distracted, for she could not hope to marry until Kalora had been properly mated and sent away. In Morovenia there is a very strict law intended to eliminate the spinster from the social horizon. It is a law born of craft and inspired by foresight.
I must find husbands for these two daughters, but I dare not hope that any one will come for Kalora until the disgraceful affair has been forgotten and I can absolutely demonstrate that she has developed into some degree of attractiveness. It is better for all concerned that she should leave Morovenia until the present scandal blows over. Now, why not America?
She followed the busy routine of dinners and balls, receptions and afternoon teas, her childish enthusiasm never lagging. She could play at golf and she seemed to know horseback riding the first time she tried it, and after the first two weeks she drove her own motor-car. The letters that went back to Morovenia were fairly dripping with superlatives and happy adjectives.
And in Morovenia, many a clever woman, deprived of specified and legal rights, has learned to rule man by those tactful methods which are in such general use that they need not be specified in this connection. Kalora had a way of getting around her father.
Morovenia is a state in which both the mosque and the motor-car now occur in the same landscape. It started out to be Turkish and later decided to be European. The Mohammedan sanctuaries with their hideous stencil decorations and bulbous domes are jostled by many new shops with blinking fronts and German merchandise.
No wonder the sisters in Michigan are organizing to batter down the walls of tradition, and bring to her the more recent privileges of her sex! Two years ago, when this story had its real beginning, the social status of woman in Morovenia was not greatly different from what it is to-day, or what it was two centuries ago. Woman had two important duties assigned to her.
Plumston was the apotheosis of all that was undesirable in her sex, but they were exceedingly polite to her, for the reason that Morovenia owed a great deal of money in London and it was a set policy to cultivate the friendship of the British.
It is not good form in Morovenia for a husband or father to discuss his home life, or to show enthusiasm on the subject of mere woman; but the Count, prompted by a fretful desire to dispose of his rapidly maturing offspring, often remarked to the high-born young gentlemen of his acquaintance that Kalora was a most remarkable girl and one possessed of many charms, leaving them to infer, if they cared to do so, that possibly she weighed at least one hundred and eighty pounds.
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