She nodded slowly.
"Paul always declared," she said, "that in those days England had no statesmen—no one who could feel what lay beyond the day-by-day horizon. When I think of that Treaty, my friend, I sympathise with you. It is not a great thing to forge chains of hate for a beaten enemy."
"If you realise this, are you not then our friend?" Immelan asked.
She appeared for a few moments to be engrossed in the tennis. Her companion, however, waited for her answer.
"In a way," she acknowledged, "I find something magnificent in your wonderfully conceived plans for vengeance, and in the spirit which has evolved and kept them alive through all these years. Then, on the other hand, I look at home, and I ask myself whether you do not make what they would call over here a cat's-paw of my country."
"Ours is the most natural and most beneficial of all possible alliances," Immelan insisted. "Germany and Russia, hand in hand, can dominate the world."
"I am not sure that it is an equal bargain, though, which you seek to drive with us," she said. "Germany aims, of course, at world power, but you are still fettered by the terms of that Treaty. You cannot build a great fleet of warships or æroplanes; you cannot train great armies; you cannot lay up for yourselves all the store that is necessary for a successful war. So you bring your brains to Russia, and you ask us to do these things; but Russia does not aim at world power. Russia seeks only for a great era of self-development. She, too, has a mighty neighbour at her gates. I am not sure that your bargain is a fair one."
"It is the first time that I have heard you talk like this," Immelan declared, with a little tremor in his tone.
"I have been in England twice during the last few months," Naida said. "You know very well at whose wish I came, I have been studying the conditions here, studying the people so far as I can. I find them such a kindly race. I find their present Government so unsuspicious, so genuinely altruistic. After all, that Treaty belongs to an England that has passed. The England of to-day would never go to war at all. They believe here that they have solved the problem of perpetual peace."
Immelan smiled a little bitterly.