"And afterwards?"
The Prince shrugged his shoulders. "Afterwards is inevitable."
"Please go on," she insisted.
"We shall occupy the whole of the coast from Antwerp to Havre. The indemnity which France and Russia will pay us will make us the mightiest nation on earth. We shall play with England as a cat with a mouse, and when the time comes…. Well, perhaps that will do," the Prince concluded, smiling.
Anna was silent for several moments.
"I am a woman, you know," she said simply, "and this sounds, in a way, terrible. Yet for months I have felt it coming."
"There is nothing terrible about it," the Prince replied, "if you keep the great principles of progress always before you. If a million or so of lives are sacrificed, the great Germany of the future, gathering under her wings the peoples of the world, will raise them to a pitch of culture and contentment and happiness which will more than atone for the sacrifices of to-day. It is, after all, the future to which we must look."
A telephone bell rang at the Prince's elbow. He listened for a moment and nodded.
"An urgent visitor demands a moment of my time," he said, rising.
"I have taken already too much," Anna declared, "but I felt it was time that I heard the truth. They fence with me so in Berlin, and, believe me, Prince Herschfeld, in Vienna the Emperor is almost wholly ignorant of what is planned."