"I respectfully beg to differ; none of these for my little girl."
"_These?_" The War Lord again raised his voice, but dropped into a hoarse whisper when he heard the officer _de jour_ address the sentinels in the corridor. "One can’t say a word without being overheard," he grumbled; "nearer, Frederick, still closer." As he continued speaking he laid his massive right hand on Frederick’s knee and hissed between his teeth: "These? You forgot that you were referring to _my_ friends."
"I did not, most assuredly I did not," returned the Ironmaster, disengaging himself by a swift movement and jumping up.
"You dare!" hissed the War Lord, again losing control of himself.
"I dare anything for my child!" cried Krupp, his face livid with rage; "and I tell you to your face none of your free-living friends for my Bertha!"
"Insolence!" roared the War Lord. "Take a care that I don’t send you to Spandau."
"I would endure Schlusselburg rather than suffer my child to marry one of _these_," insisted the Ironmaster doggedly.
The War Lord gazed at the speaker for twenty or more seconds, then said in a tone of command: "You can go. Send in Moltke" (referring to his adjutant, later chief of the general staff).
With the latter he remained closeted a quarter of an hour—quite a long space of time for a person of the War Lord’s character—and it is said that he tried to persuade the blond giant (Moltke was blond and blooming then) that Krupp was a madman, as crazy as the Mad Hatter. Otherwise he would never have dared oppose his plebeian will against that of the supreme master. Of course not!
Of Moltke’s counter-arguments we know naught, but the War Lord’s visit to Essen wound up with a grand banquet of sixty covers, and in the course of it host and Imperial guest toasted each other in honeyed words.
Less than two months later Frederick Krupp died by his own hand, and Bertha Krupp—sixteen, homely and already prone to embonpoint—mounted the throne of the Cannon Kings, as the War Lord had willed.
And, as he had insisted, she became automatically a pawn in his hand, his _alter ego_ for destruction and misery.
Ever since his intimacy with Frederick, the War Lord had looked upon the Krupp plant as the power house for the realisation of his ambition—the conquest of the world; and to a very considerable extent Frederick had aided and abetted his plans by employing his genius for invention and business to commercialise war, and making it fit in with the general scheme of high finance.