Elfriede’s husband. Does she love him? They were married four years ago. She’d celebrated her eighteenth birthday only a month before the wedding, in a small party attended by her parents and siblings and prospective sisters-in-law (her husband is an orphan) and Gerhard himself—of course—aged thirty-three, the giant Baron von Kleist who was doing her such a preposterous honor as to marry her. Of course, her beauty was to blame for that. Why else should a baron of such ancient lineage, of considerable fortune and figure, stoop to marry the daughter of a mere burgher? They had met skating on the village pond, a democratic location. Elfriede was an especially graceful skater, and Gerhard was not, and whether by accident or intent he had crashed into her, just gently enough that she wasn’t hurt, but so decisively that he had no choice but to apologize profusely for the accident and buy her a cider. “Why, he’s in love with you,” her mother whispered eagerly the next day, after the baron paid an afternoon call to assure himself of Elfriede’s recovery, and Elfriede—well, Elfriede was too overwhelmed, too flattered, too mesmerized to understand whether she returned that love or not. Gerhard von Kleist was not exactly handsome, but he was tall and magnificently built, he was well-dressed and well-read, he had a disarmingly earnest way about him, and above all he was Gerhard von Kleist! He was a nobleman, the hereditary master of Schloss Kleist; he was a great man, he was an officer in the army, he hunted often with the Kaiser himself. By April they were engaged; by June the banns were called, and on the first of July they were married in the beautiful church in the village, disapproving sisters-in-law to one side and ecstatic parents to the other, amid much good-natured congregational whispering about the baron’s haste to make the flaxen-haired Elfriede his lawful bride.