The White Morning | Page 4

of days no longer enlivened by maneuvers and
boudoirs, had amused himself on the stock exchange. His judgment had
been singularly bad and he had dropped most of his capital and lived on
the rest.
The town house must be sold and the countess and her daughters retire
to her castle in the Saxon Alps. As there were no portions for the girls,
the haunting terrors of matrimony were laid.
The four women took their comparative poverty with equanimity. The
countess had been as practical and economical as all German
housewives, even when relieved by housekeepers and stewards, and she
calculated that with a meager staff of servants and two years of
seclusion she should be able to furnish a flat in Berlin and pay a year's
rent in advance. Then by living for half the year on her estate she
should save enough for six highly agreeable months in the capital.
Perhaps she might let her castle to some rich brewer or American; and
this she eventually did.
Lili was given permission to study for the operatic stage and spend the
following winter in Dresden, where Mariette's husband was now
quartered. It was just before they moved to the country that the Gräfin
said to her girls as they sat at coffee in the dismantled house:
"You shall have all that I never had, fulfil all the secret ambitions of my
younger heart. If you are individuals, prove it. You may go on the stage,
write, paint, study law, medicine, what you will. You have been bred
aristocrats and aristocrats you will remain. It is not liberty that
vulgarizes. Don't hate men. They have charming phases and moods; but
avoid entangling alliances until you are thirty. After that you will know
them well enough to avoid that fatal initial submergence. The whole
point is to begin with your eyes open and your campaign clearly
thought out.

"I, too, purpose to get a great deal out of life now that my fate is in my
own hands. By the summer we shall even be able to travel a little.
Third-class, yet that will be far more amusing than stuffed into one of
those plush carriages with the windows closed and forbidden to speak
with any one in the corridor. And forced to carry all the hand-luggage
off the train (when your father had an economical spasm and would not
take a footman) while he stalked out first as if we did not exist. I shall
never marry again--Gott in Himmel, no!--but I shall gather about me all
the interesting men I never have been able to have ten minutes'
conversation with alone; and, so far as is humanly possible, do exactly
as I please. My ego has been starved. I shall always be your best
friend--but think for yourselves."
Gisela had no gift that she was aware of, but she was intellectual and
had longed to finish her education at one of the great universities. As
she was not strong, however, she was content to spend a year in the
mountains; and then, robust, and on a meager income, she went to
Munich to attend the lectures on art and literature and to perfect herself
in French and English. She took a small room in an old tower near the
Frauenkirche and lived the students' life, probably the freest of any city
in the world. She dropped her title and name lest she be barred from
that socialistic community as well as discovered by horrified relatives,
and called herself Gisela Döring. After she had taken her degree she
passed a month in Berlin with her mother, who already had established
a salon, but she was determined to support herself and see the world at
the same time. Herr Doktor Meyers found her a position as governess
with a wealthy American patient, and, under her assumed name, she
sailed immediately for New York.
The Bolands had a house in upper Fifth Avenue and others at Newport,
Aiken and Bar Harbor; and when not occupying these stations were in
Europe or southern California. The two little girls passed the summer at
Bar Harbor with their governess.
It took Gisela some time to accustom herself to the position of upper
servant in that household of many servants, but she possessed humor
and she had had governesses herself. Her salary was large, she had one
entire day in the week to herself, except at Bar Harbor, and during her
last summer in the United States Mrs. Boland had a violent attack of
"America first" and took her children and their admirable governess not

only to California but to the Yellowstone Park, the Grand Cañon and
Canada. They traveled in a private car, and Gisela, who could enjoy the
comfortless quarters of a student flat in Munich