With all their millions, the
very most that they could ever hope to attain would be to marry their
daughters with ordinary soldiers. Whilst Karl! . . . The relatives of
Karl! . . . and the Romantica let her pen run on, glorifying a family in
whose bosom she fancied she had been born.
From time to time were enclosed with Elena's effusions brief, crisp
notes directed to Desnoyers. The brother-in-law continued giving an
account of his operations the same as when living on the ranch under
his protection. But with this deference was now mixed a badly concealed
pride, an evident desire to retaliate for his times of voluntary
humiliation. Everything that he was doing was grand and glorious. He had
invested his millions in the industrial enterprises of modern Germany.
He was stockholder of munition factories as big as towns, and of
navigation companies launching a ship every half year. The Emperor was
interesting himself in these works, looking benevolently on all those
who wished to aid him. Besides this, Karl was buying land. At first
sight, it seemed foolish to have sold the fertile fields of their
inheritance in order to acquire sandy Prussian wastes that yielded only
to much artificial fertilizing; but by becoming a land owner, he now
belonged to the "Agrarian Party," the aristocratic and conservative
group par excellence, and thus he was living in two different but
equally distinguished worlds--that of the great industrial friends
of the Emperor, and that of the Junkers, knights of the countryside,
guardians of the old traditions and the supply-source of the officials
of the King of Prussia.
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