CHAPTER XIX
THE VOICE OF BERLIN
Tom Graves loved Bertha Wedekind with all his fine, pure, close-fibered strength.
But he was no purblind fool.
Never haying had much experience with women, his judgment was fresh and unclouded. He was free from the incubus of lying sensuality. Thus he recognized her faults; and he loved her none the less dearly.
And her greatest fault, rather her misfortune, was that at the most impressionable stage of her girlhood, she had come under the spell and glamour, for spell and glamour it was for all its harsh, mean tawdriness, of the Prussian military clique.
Her experience in life was nil. Her knowledge of history, civilization, and economics was the usual useless average, the usual useless hodge-podge of school text-books and romantic fiction.
Carefully hedged in by her Uncle Heinrich, by her uncle's friends, by the young officers and high officials she met, she was only allowed to see what was best in Berlin, and in a mistaken sweep of loyalty to her father's native land she compared it with what was worst in America. She gloried in the pomp and circumstance, enthusiasm shining in her clear young eyes when she walked down Unter den Linden with Baron Horst von Götz-Wrede or the little Hussar, when she
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