ran with military precision, and no one dared to be the fraction of a
minute late for meals or social engagements. They attended the theater,
the opera, court functions, dinners, balls, on stated nights, and unless
the Kaiser took a whim and altered a date, there was no deviation from
this routine year in and out. They walked at the same hour, drove in the
Tiergarten with the rest of fashionable Berlin, started for their castle
in the Saxon Alps not only upon the same day but on the same train every
summer, and the electric lights went out at precisely the same moment
every night; the count's faithful steward manipulated a central stop.
They were encouraged to read and study, but not--oh, by no means--to
have individual opinions. The men of Germany were there to do the
thinking and they did it.

Perhaps the rebellion of the Niebuhr girls would never have crystallized
(for, after all, their everyday experience was much like that of other
girls of their class, merely intensified by their father's persistence
of executive ardors) had it not been for two subtle influences, quite
unsuspected by the haughty Kammerherr: they had an American friend, Kate
Terriss, who was "finishing her voice" in Berlin, and their married
sister, Mariette, had recently spent a fortnight in the paternal nest.

The count despised the entire American race, as all good Prussians did,
but he was as wax to feminine blandishments outside of his family, and
Miss Terriss was pretty, diplomatic, alluring, and far cleverer than he
would have admitted any woman could be. She wound the old martinet
round her finger, subdued her rampant Americanism in his society, and
amused herself sowing the seeds of rebellion in the minds of "those poor
Niebuhr girls." As the countess also liked her, she had been "in and out
of the house" for nearly a year. The young Prussians had alternately
gasped and wept at the amazing stories of the liberty, the petting, the