We both laughed, but I still felt that in the same way as behind the jealousy which I pretended for fun a real movement of this passion lay hid, so behind the chat with which she affected to tease me there lay a germ of truth.
The arrangement to marry my son Rudolf one day to Lori’s little Beatrix was still kept intact. It was of course more in play than in reality—the main question whether the children’s hearts would beat for each other could only be decided by the future. That in a worldly point of view my Rudolf would be a most eligible match was certain, and so much the more fastidious might he be in choosing. Beatrix indeed promised to be a great beauty, but if she took after her mother in coquetry and shallowness of mind she would not be one I should desire for a daughter-in-law. But all that was in the far distance.
Lori’s husband had not shared in the Schleswig-Holstein campaign, and that annoyed him much. Lori too was grieved at this “ill-luck”.
“Such a nice victorious war,” she complained. “Griesbach would have been sure to have got a step by this time. However, the comfort is that in the next campaign——”
“What are you thinking of?” I broke in. “There is not the least prospect of that. Do you know any cause for it? What should a war be waged about now?”
“What for? Really I have nothing to do with that. Wars come—and there they are. Every five or six years something breaks out. That is the regular course of history.”
“But surely some reasons must exist for it.”
“Perhaps, but who knows what they are? Certainly I don’t, nor my husband either. I asked him in the course of the late war ‘What is the exact thing they are fighting about down there?’ ‘I don’t know,’ he replied, shrugging his shoulders, ‘it is all the same to me. But it is a bore that I am not there,’ he added. Oh, Griesbach is a true soldier. The ‘why’ and ‘what for’ of the wars are not the business of the soldiers. The diplomatists settle that amongst themselves. I never bothered my brains about all these political squabbles. It is not the business of us women at all—we should besides understand nothing of it. When once the storm has broken we have only to pray——”
“That it may strike our neighbours and not ourselves—that is certainly the most simple plan.”
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