The Project Gutenberg eBook, The White Morning, by Gertrude Atherton

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Title: The White Morning

Author: Gertrude Atherton

Release Date: September 18, 2004 [eBook #13496]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WHITE MORNING***

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THE WHITE MORNING

A Novel of the Power of the German Women in Wartime

by

GERTRUDE ATHERTON

[Illustration: GISELA
_Photograph by Arnold Genthe, N.Y._]

I

1

Countess Gisela Niebuhr sat in the long dusk of Munich staring over at
the beautiful park that in happier days had been famous in the world as
the Englischer Garten, and deliberately recalled on what might be the
last night of her life the successive causes that had led to her
profound dissatisfaction with her country as a woman. She was so
thoroughly disgusted with it as a German that personal grievances were
far from necessary to fortify her for the momentous role she was to play
with the dawn; but in this rare hour of leisure it amused her naturally
introspective mind to rehearse certain episodes whose sum had made her
what she was.

When she was fourteen and her sisters Lili and Elsa sixteen and eighteen
they had met in the attic of their home in Berlin one afternoon when
their father was automatically at his club and their mother taking her
prescribed hour of rest, and solemnly pledged one another never to
marry. The causes of this vital conclave were both cumulative and
immediate. Their father, the Herr Graf, a fine looking junker of sixty
odd, with a roving eye and a martial air despite a corpulence which
annoyed him excessively, had transferred his lost authority over his
regiment to his household. The boys were in their own regiments and rid
of parental discipline, but the countess and the girls received the full
benefit of his military, and Prussian, relish for despotism.

In his essence a kind man and fond of his women, he balked their every
individual wish and allowed them practically no liberty. They never left
the house unattended, like the America