The following day, at three-thirty in the afternoon, the baron’s wife arrived at the estate of her friend. The two women met in the private parlor of the hostess and were soon nibbling on cakes, drinking coffee, and visiting freely, first about the weather, then about flowers. It took some time for the subject of the children to be brought up.

The two women had been best friends for some time. They had married within a year of each other, to neighboring noblemen, then given birth to their firstborn within two years of one another. And as the years went by, and neither had more children, and the two youngsters played and romped and laughed and cried together, how could it have been otherwise than that the two friends would find themselves speaking upon occasion of a potential marriage? Such could not have been more perfect and fitting, especially in Ingrid’s eyes, and as the years slowly progressed, the onetime daydreaming of two young mothers and friends became more and more considered, on the one of the two estates, a fait accompli.

All the while as her own fortunes declined, Countess Ingrid von Schmundt cherished an ever-more-fervent desire after her son’s success and reputation and standing, the foundation of which lay in the joining of the vast estates and the union of two respected aristocratic names. The joint holdings would be formidable, one of the largest estates in all the northeast of Germany. Her son would be respected throughout the land, and she would remain at his side. He would one day occupy a powerful role in the new German order. If the limelight was not directed upon her as it once had been, she would be content to share in its glow. For would not all recognize her as the societal matriarch of the Schmundt name, and look to her as the far more capable mistress of the empire, rather than the lightheaded and naive daughter of that simpleton of a baron?

For her own convenience, the count’s wife assumed her friend felt exactly as she, though the two women spoke less and less of it as time went by, for very different reasons on each side.

In recent years Marion had known a distance was creeping between them. Not a distance of antagonism or conflict, but of gradually diverging directions of purpose. Such was no doubt inevitable, for had they not married men as different as night and day? How could the two wives not be influenced by the path of each of their husbands? And on a more profound level, did not the man each one chose speak as forcefully as her own character concerning the kind of woman she was at the core?