“Let me say to you what a French girl thinks! A hundred years ago you were a very small nation, but you were homogeneous and the average of culture was far higher in America then than it is at present. For now, your people’s cultivation and civilisation is diluted by the ignorance of millions of foreigners to whom you have given hospitality. And, of these, the Germans have done you the most deadly injury, vulgarising public taste in art and literature, affronting your clean, sane intelligence by the new decadence and perversion in music, in painting, in illustration, in fiction.
“Whatever the normal Hun touches he vulgarises; whatever the decadent Boche touches he soils and degrades and transforms into a horrible abomination. This he has done under your eyes in art, in literature, in architecture, in modern German music.
“His filthy touch is even on your domestic life—this Barbarian who feeds grossly, whose personal habits are a by-word among civilised and cultured people, whose raw ferocity is being now revealed to the world day by day in Europe, whose proverbial clumsiness and stupidity have long furnished your stage with its oafs and clowns.
“This is the thing that is now also invading you with thousands of spies, betraying you with millions of traitors, 181 and which will one day turn on you and tear you and trample you like an enraged hog, unless you and your people awake to what is passing in the world you live in!”
She was on her feet now, flushed, lovely, superb in her deep and controlled excitement.
“I’ll tell you this much,” she said. “It is Germany that wishes my destruction. Germany trapped me; Germany would have destroyed me in the trap had I not escaped. Now, Germany is afraid of me, knowing what I know. And her agents follow me, spy on me, thwart me, prevent me from earning my living, until I—I can scarcely endure it—this hounding and persecution——” Her voice broke; she waited to control it:
“I am not a spy. I never was one. I never betrayed a human soul—no, nor any living thing that ever trusted me! These people who hound me know that I am not guilty of that for which another Government is ready to try me—and condemn me. They fear that I shall prove to this other Government my innocence. I can’t. But they fear I can. And the Hun is afraid of me. Because, if I ever proved my innocence, it would involve the arrest and trial and certain execution of men high in rank in the capital of this other country. So—the Hun dogs me everywhere I go. I do not know why he does not try to kill me. Possibly he lacks courage, so far. Possibly he has not had any good opportunity, because I am very careful, Garry.”
“But this—this is outrageous!” broke out Barres. “You can’t stand this sort of thing, Thessa! It’s a matter for the police——”
“Don’t interfere!”
“But——”