, as a matter of fact, she had given little thought to politics.
However, she recalled her typical papa.

Of course they talked their German souls inside out. At least Nettelbeck
did. As time went on, Gisela used her frankness as a mask while her soul
dodged in panic. She believed him to be lightly and agreeably in love
with her (she had witnessed many summer flirtations at Bar Harbor, and
been laid siege to by more than one young American, idle, enterprising,
charming and quite irresponsible), and she was appalled at her own
capacity for love and suffering, the complete rout of her theories,
based on harsh experience, before the ancient instinct to unleash her
womanhood at any cost.

She plunged into a serious study of the country, which she had
heretofore absorbed with her avid mental conduits, and read innumerable
newspapers, magazines, elucidating literature of all sorts, besides the
best histories of the nation and the illuminating biographies of its
distinguished men in politics and the arts. She was deeply responsive to
the freedom of the individual in this great whirling heterogeneous land,
and as her duties at any time were the reverse of onerous, it was
imperative to keep her consciousness as detached from her inner life as
possible.

But at the back of her mind was always the haunting terror that he never
would come again, that he was really more attracted to Ann Howland than
he knew; and of all American women whom Gisela had met she admired Miss
Howland preeminently. She was not only beautiful in the grand manner but
she possessed intellect as distinguished from the surface "brightness"
of so many of her countrywomen, and had made a deep impression upon even
the superlatively educated German girl when they had chanced to meet and
talk at children's picnics at Bar Harbor, or when the triumphant young
beauty ran up to the nursery in town to bring a message to the little
Bolands from her sisters. It was true that hers was not the seductive
type of beauty, that her large gray eyes were cool and appraising, her
fine skin quite without color, and her soft abundant hair little darker
than Franz's own, but she could be feminine and charming when she chose
and she would be a wife in whom even a German would experience a secret
and swelling pride.

What chance had she--she--Gisela Doering?

There were days and weeks, during that second winter, when she was
tormented by a sort of sub-hysteria, a stifled voice in t