"My _tear_ Miss Warren--I will try to do all that you want--You will not do _anything I_ want, but never mind. I will show you that Germans can be generous. I will speak about your mother. I am sorry that there are bad-mannered Germans in the hotel. There are some--what-you-call 'bounders'--among us, as there are with you. It is to be regretted. As to our Red Cross hospitals, I know of a person who can make things easy for you. I will write a letter to my cousin--like me she is a Saxon and comes from Leipzig--Minna von Stachelberg. She is but a few months widow, widow of a Saxon officer, Graf von Stachelberg who was killed at Namur. Oh! it was very sad; they were but six months married. Afterwards she came here to work in our Red Cross--I think now she is in charge of a ward..." So Vivie found a few months' reprieve from acute sorrow and bitter humiliation. Graefin von Stachelberg was as kind in her way as her cousin the Colonel, but much less sentimental. In fact she was of that type of New German woman, taken all too little into account by our Press at the time of the War. There were many like her of the upper middle class, the professorial class, the lesser nobility to be found not only in Leipzig but in Berlin, Hamburg, Frankfort, Halle, Bonn, Muenchen, Hannover, Bremen, Jena, Stuttgart, Cologne--nice to look at, extremely modern in education and good manners, tasteful in dress, speaking English marvellously well, highly accomplished in music or with some other art, advocates of the enfranchisement of women. The War came just too soon. Had Heaven struck down that epilept Emperor and a few of his ministers, had time been given for the New German Woman to assert herself in politics, there would have been no invasion of Belgium, no maltreatment of Servia. Germany would have ranged herself with the Western powers and Western culture. Minna von Stachelberg read her cousin's note and received the worn and anxious-looking Vivie like a sister ... like a comrade, she said, in the War for the Vote ... "which we will resume, my dear, as soon as this dreadful Man's war is over, only we won't fight with the same weapons." But though kind, she was not gushing and she soon told Vivie that in nursing she was a novice and had much to learn. She introduced her to the German and Belgian surgeons, and then put her to a series of entirely menial tasks from which she was to work her way up by degrees. But if any English soldier were there and wanted sympathy, she should be called in to his ward ... From that interview Vivie returned almost happy.