As she had long lost her parents and as she was quite defenceless
against her husband's hostile guardians, the care of her interests
devolved naturally upon him.... He released her from troublesome
obligations and directed her demands toward a safe goal.... Then, very
tenderly, he lifted her with all the roots of her being from the old,
poverty-stricken soil of her earlier years and transplanted her to
Berlin where, by the help of his brother's wife--still gently pressing
on and smoothing the way himself--he created a new way of life
for her.

In a villa, hidden by foliage from Lake Constance, her husband slowly
drowsed toward dissolution. She herself ripened in the sharp air of
the capital and grew almost into another woman in this banal,
disillusioned world, sober even in its intoxication.

Of society, from whose official section her fate as well as her
commoner's name separated her, she saw just enough to feel the
influence of the essential conceptions that governed it.

She lost diffidence and awkwardness, she became a woman of the world
and a connoisseur of life. She learned to condemn one day what she
forgave the next, she learned to laugh over nothing and to grieve over
nothing and to be indignant over nothing.

But what surprised Niebeldingk more than these small adaptations to
the omnipotent spirit of her new environment, was the deep revolution
experienced by her innermost being.

She had been a clinging, self-effacing, timid soul. Within three years