The next day she went back to work at the hospital.

To Minna, she said:  “I can never, never, never forget your kindness and sympathy.  ‘Sister’ seems an insufficient name to call you by.  Whatever happens, unless you cast me off, we shall be friends....  I dare say I even owe my life to you, if it is worth anything.  But it is.  I want to live—­now—­I want to live to be revenged.  I want to live to help Bertie’s”—­her voice still shook over the name—­“Bertie’s wife and children.  I expect but for you I should have been tried already in the Senate for complicity with ...  Bertie ... and found guilty and shot...”

Minna:  “I won’t go so far as to say you are right.  But I certainly was alarmed about you, when you were arrested.  Of course I knew nothing—­nothing—­about that poor young man till just before his execution when Pastor Walcker came to me.  Even then I could do nothing, and I understood so badly what had happened.  But about you:  I said to myself, if I do not do something, you can perhaps be sentenced to imprisonment ... and I did bestir myself, you can bet!” (Minna liked to show she knew a slangy phrase or two.) “So I telegraphed to the Emperor, I besieged von Bissing at the Ministere des Sciences et des Arts; wrote to him, telegraphed to him, telephoned to him, sat in his anterooms, neglected my hospital work entirely from Friday to Monday—­

“I expect as a matter of fact they found nothing in that poor young’s man’s papers to implicate you.  They just wanted—­the brutes—­to give you a good fright ... and I dare say ... such is the military mind—­even wished you to see him shot.

“By the bye, I suppose you have heard that von Bissing is very ill?  Dying, perhaps—­”

Vivie:  “I hope so.  I am so glad.  I hope it’s a painful illness and that he’ll die and find there really is a Hell, and an uncommonly hot one!”

It must not be supposed from the frequent quotations from Countess von Stachelberg’s condemnations of German cruelties that she was an unpatriotic woman, repudiating, apostatizing from her own country.  On the contrary:  she held—­mistakenly or not—­that Germany had been the victim of secret diplomacy, had been encircled by a ring fence of enemies, refused the economic guarantees she required, and the colonial expansion she desired.  Minna disliked the Slavs, did not believe in them, save as musicians, singers, painters, dancers, and actors.  She believed Germany had a great civilizing, culture-spreading mission in South-east Europe; and that the germs of this war lay in the policy of Chamberlain, the protectionism of the United States, the revengeful spirit and colonial selfishness of France.

But she shuddered over the German cruelties in Belgium and France.  The horrors of War were a revelation to her and she was henceforth a Pacifist before all things. “Your old statesmen and our old or middle-aged generals, my dear, are alike to blame.  But you and I know where the real mischief lies.  We are mis-ruled by an All-Man Government. I, certainly, don’t want the other extreme, an All-Woman Government.  What we want, and must have, is a Man-and-Woman—­a Married—­Government. Then we shall settle our differences without going to war.”