"You don't produce them in great numbers—like the young lady I speak of."
"Ah, she was good-looking?" laughed Winnington. "That, of course, gave her a most unfair advantage."
"A man's jest," said the other dryly—"and an old one. But naturally women take all the advantage they can get—out of anything. They need it. However, this young lady had plenty of other gifts—besides her beauty. She was as strong as most men. She rode, she climbed, she sang. The whole hotel did nothing but watch her. She was the centre of everything. But after a little while she insisted on leaving her father down here to over-eat himself and play cards, while she went with her maid and a black mare that nobody but she wanted to ride, up to the Jagd-hütte in the forest. There!—you can see a little blue smoke coming from it now"—
She pointed through the window to the great forest-clothed cliff, some five thousand feet high, which fronted the hotel; and across a deep valley, just below its topmost point, Mark Winnington saw a puff of smoke mounting into the clear sky.
—"Of course there was a great deal of talk. The men gossipped and the women scoffed. Her father, who adored her and could not control her in the least, shrugged his shoulders, played bridge all day long with an English family, and would sit on the verandah watching the path—that path there—which comes down from the Jagd-hütte with a spy-glass. Sometimes she would send him down a letter by one of the Jager's boys, and he would send a reply. And every now and then she would come down—riding—like a Brunhilde, with her hair all blown about her—and her eyes—Ach, superb!"
The little dowdy woman threw up her hands.
Her neighbour's face shewed that the story interested and amused him.
"A Valkyrie, indeed! But how a feminist?"
"You shall hear. One evening she offered to give an address at the hotel on 'Women and the Future.' She was already of course regarded as half mad, and her opinions were well known. Some people objected, and spoke to the manager. Her father, it was said, tried to stop it, but she got her own way with him. And the manager finally decided that the advertisement would be greater than the risk. When the evening came the place was bondé; people came from every inn and pension round for miles. She spoke beautiful German, she had learnt it from a German governess who had brought her up, and been a second mother to her; and she hadn't a particle of mauvaise honte. Somebody had draped some Austrian and English flags behind her. The South Germans and Viennese, and Hungarians who came to listen—just the same kind of people who are here to-night—could hardly keep themselves on their chairs. The men laughed and stared—I heard a few brutalities—but they couldn't keep their eyes off her, and in the end they cheered her. Most of the women were shocked, and wished they hadn't come, or let their girls come. And the girls themselves sat open-mouthed—drinking it in."
"Amazing!" laughed the Englishman. "Wish I had been there! Was it an onslaught upon men?"