The scene at the palace had been brilliant and sustaining and she had
received much personal homage, for she was looking very beautiful and
radiant, and the little adventure had been incense to her pride
(moreover the young Freifrau von Nettelbeck, whom she saw on his arm
later, was an insignificant little hausfrau); but when she was in her
room after midnight she realized grimly that if she had not done her
work so well during that terrible month in New York and buried her sex
heart, she should once more be beating the floor or the wall with her
impotent hands. But the knowledge of her immunity made her a little sad.


3

The next episode to her grim humor was wholly amusing, although it
played its part in her developing sense of revolt against the attitude
of the German male to the sex of the mother that bore him. She returned
to Munich after a month in Berlin, for by this time she had made up her
mind to write, and the city by the Isar was the most beautiful in the
world to write and to dream in. Moreover, she wished to attend the
lectures on drama at the University.

The four years in America, during which she had, in spite of her
sentimental preoccupation, studied diligently every phase that passed
before her keen critical vision, analyzed every person she had met, and
passed many of her evenings in the study of the best contemporary
fiction, had, associated with the spur of her own upheaval, developed
her imagination, and her head was full of unwritten stories. They were
highly realistic, of course, as became a modern German, but unmistakably
dramatic.