stiny.

Gisela never told him the truth. Sometimes, irritated by his subtle
arrogance, she was tempted. Also consuming love tempted her. But of what
use? She was without fortune and he must add to his. He had a limited
income and expensive tastes, and when a young nobleman in the diplomatic
service marries he must take a house and live with a certain amount of
state. Moreover, he intended to be an ambassador before he was
forty-five, and he was justified in his ambitions, for he was
exceptionally clever and his rise had been rapid. But now he was
care-free and young, and love was his right.

Gisela understood him perfectly. Not only was she of his class, but her
brother Karl had madly loved a girl in a chocolate shop and wept
tempestuously beside her bed while their father slept. He married
philosophically when his hour struck.

But if she understood she was also romantic. She forgot her vow to live
alone, her mother's advice, and dreamed of a moment of overwhelming
madness which would sweep them both up to the little church on the
mountain. There, like a true heroine of old-time fiction, she would
announce her own name at the altar. This moment, however, did not
arrive. Nettelbeck, too, was romantic, but his head was as level within
as it was flat behind. He never went near the church on the mountain.

There was no surface lovemaking during the first two summers, or in the
winter following the second summer, when he came over from Washington on
her Wednesday as often as he could, and they had luncheon and tea in
byway restaurants. They were both fascinated by the game, and they had
an infinite number of things to talk about, for their minds were really
congenial. They disputed with fire and fury. It was a part of Gisela's
dormant genius to grasp instinctively the psychology of foreign nations,
and before she had been in the United States a year she understood it
far better than Nettelbeck ever would. Even if he had despised it less
he would have lavished all the resources of his wit upon a country so
different from Germany in every phase that it must necessarily be
negligible save as a future colony of Prussia, if only for the pleasure
of seeing Gisela's long eyes open and flash, the dusky red in her
cheeks burn crimson and her bosom heave at his "junker narrow-mindedness
and stupid arrogance"--; "a stupidity that will be the ruin of Germany
in the end!" she exclaimed one day in a sudden moment of illumination,
for