Gisela, like many women of dominating intellect and personality, had
exhausted her power of sex-love with her first unfortunate but prolonged
passion, and although she had no hatred of men, and indeed liked many
and craved their society, she gave her real sympathies and affections
to her women friends. She had no intimates, and this, perhaps, was one
secret of her power. A certain aloofness is essential in intellectual
leadership. But if she had no talent for intimacy she had much for
friendship, and the friends of her inner circle were all women, partly
because there was no waste of time fending off love-making, partly
because there were more interests in common, consequently a deeper bond.
To-night she was filled with an irresistible pity and a longing to set
them free. But her hands were tied. She dared not even go to Great
Headquarters and protest against the terrible fate of the young girls of
Lille. She would have accomplished no good and become an instant object
of suspicion.


3

For many months she did her duty doggedly, her indignation routed by the
disquieting fact that the Germans were retreating from the Somme; inch
by inch, but still retreating. Once she might have been satisfied with
grandiose phrases and scornful assurances. But the long attack on Verdun
had ended in dark humiliation; a failure that the most resourceful
vocabulary was unable to translate into a German advantage, optically
inverted.

More than half a million young Germans had fallen before Verdun, and for
what? That France, disdained these many years by the mighty Teutonic
Empire, and numerically inferior, might demonstrate to the world that