in the Vienna of 1815--two love-stories, lightly and quaintly told,
across which, through the chatter of a little Viennese salon, we dimly
see Napoleon return from Elba and hear the thunder of Waterloo. A young
cub of a Saxon schoolmaster, full of simple-hearted enthusiasm and
philosophy, comes down to the Austrian capital, and, taken up by a
kindly, coquettish young countess, becomes the tutor of her cousin, a
girl as simple as he. The older woman with her knowing charm, the
younger with her freshness, present a dualism more bewildering than any
he has ever read about in his philosophy books, and part of the fun
consists in seeing him fall in love with the younger in terms of pure
reason, and finally, when the motherly young countess has quietly got
him a professorship at Konigsberg, present to his delighted Elise his
"categorical imperative."

You can imagine that thoroughly German mixture of sentiment and
philosophy, the quaint references to a Prussia not yet, in its present
sense, begun to exist; how to that audience--nearly every one of whom
had a son or husband or brother at the front--the century suddenly
seemed to close up and the Napoleonic days became part of their own
"grosse Zeit." You can imagine the young schoolmaster and the frivolous
older man going off to war, and the two women consoling each other, and
with what strange eloquence the words of that girl of 1815, watching
them from the window, come down across the years:

"Why is it that from time to time men must go and kill each other?
There it stands in the paper--two thousand more men--it writes itself so
easily! But that every one of them has a wife or mother or sister or a--
... And when they cry their eyes out that means that it is a victory,
and when some brave young fellow has fallen, he is only one of the
'forces'--so and so many men--and nobody even knows his name..."