The Romans! How?
Hermann.
Yea, what the devil think’st thou?
And yet the Roman ladies really must,
When they adorn themselves, have decent hair.
Thusnelda.
Have then the Roman women none at all?
Hermann.
None, I say, save what’s black—all black and stiff, like witches;
Not fair, and dry, and golden, like this of thine.
The voices ceased, and at this point the applause burst out in a storm. Avice passed her hand over her eyes, starting violently at being thus dragged back to the every-day world. So life-like had been the scene, one seemed to be transported to those strange, far-back primitive days—the days before that dim and distant Hermannsschlacht, about which historiographers are even yet not agreed. But far more wonderful to Avice was the way in which her friend had, as it were, transformed herself from the collected, well-bred, sophisticated young lady of to-day, into an ancient Teuton chieftainess, a primal Germanic mother, in whose beautiful face there were not wanting passion and fierceness—whoso reads the rest of the play may learn the pitiless brutal vengeance which Thusnelda wreaked upon Ventidius—not wanting her elements of ‘the tiger and the ape.’ And yet how grand she was—how majestic! And how tameless looked this Teuton princess! It was not fear that troubled her—she felt no fear—but anger, and boundless haughty astonishment. The Roman women, forsooth! What was she to them, or they to her? She felt as if she could crush a dozen of them with one blow of her ample hand.
This picture was shown twice. Wilhelmi rubbed his hands in rapture.
‘Splendid!’ he cried, ‘worth coming miles to see. Didn’t she do it grandly?—didn’t she look every inch the Teuton queen?’