“Impossible!” asserted Frau Stern.
“Unspeakable!” declared Frau Heitner.
“It must not be!” announced Frau Werner.
In outraged wrath they appealed to their husbands to interfere.
“It is for the good of the Fatherland,” the husbands one and all declared. “What man would not have ten wives if he could?”
They appealed to the Mayor, to the Governor, even to the Kaiser himself, but in vain. To a man they welcomed the idea.
So the Gretchen plan was carried out. Each war hero took ten wives, not only in Eisen, but throughout the land.
Nevertheless, Frau Werner and the other aggrieved respectable advocates of monogamy had their revenge.
As invariably happens after a war, all the babies born were boy babies.
“Aha!” cried Frau Werner exultantly, as each new birth was announced. “Twenty years from now there will not be women enough to go around. Each wife then will have to have ten husbands. I wonder how the men will like that?”