"His Excellency is quite well again this morning, my lady," he said.
Just as impulse rather than design governed the greater part of Dodo's conduct, so intuition rather than logic was responsible for her conclusions. She had not agreed last night with Edith's reasonings, but now with these glimpses of her own, she jumped to her deduction, and landed, so to speak, by Edith's side. As yet there was nothing definite except the unpublished news of an Austrian ultimatum to Servia, and the hurried meeting of the Cabinet this morning to warrant grounds for any real uneasiness as to the European situation generally, nor, as far as Dodo knew, anything definite or indefinite to connect Germany with that. But now with the fact that her dinner had been put off last night and the ambassador was quite well this morning, coupled with her own sudden intuition that the Allensteins were going back post-haste to Germany, she leaped to a conclusion that seemed firm to her landing. In a flash she simply found herself believing that Germany intended to provoke a European war.... And then characteristically enough, instead of dwelling for a moment on the menace of this hideous calamity or contemplating the huge unspeakable nightmare thus unveiled, she found herself exclusively and entrancedly interested in the situation as it at this moment was. She expected the entire diplomatic world, German and Austrian included, at her ball that night; already the telegraph wires between London and the European capitals must be tingling and twitching with the cypher messages that flew backwards and forwards over the Austrian ultimatum, and her eyes danced with anticipation of the swift silent current of drama that would be roaring under the conventional ice of the mutual salutations with which diplomatists would greet each other this evening at her house. Hands unseen were hewing at the foundations of empires, others were feverishly buttressing and strengthening them, and all the hours of to-night until dawn brought on another fateful day, those same hands, smooth and polite, would be crossing in the dance, and the voices that had been dictating all day the messages with which the balance of peace and war was weighted, would be glib with little compliments and airy with light laughter. She felt no doubt that Germans and Austrians alike would all be there, she felt also that the very strain of the situation would inspire them with a more elaborate cordiality than usual. She felt she would respect that; it would be like the well-bred courtesies that preceded a duel to the death between gentlemen. Prince Albert, it is true, in his anxiety to get back without delay to his fortressed fatherland had failed in the amenities, but surely Germany, the romantic, the chivalrous, the mother of music and science, would, now and henceforth, whatever the issue might be, prove herself worthy of her traditions.