I might have questioned her notion of the nationality of some of the names she mentioned, but what did it matter?
Obviously it was a waste of breath to ask whether she was pleased with the change of events that had given Germany universal suffrage for both sexes. She had voted, of course, at the first opportunity, dragging _him_ along with her; he had so little interest in those matters. Her political opinions were no less decided than her artistic. Ludwig? She had often seen him. He was rather a harmless individual, but his position had not been harmless. It was a relief to be rid of him and all his clan. He would have made a much better stable-boy than king. He had wanted war just as much as had the Kaiser, whose robber-knight blood had shown up in him. But the Kaiser had not personally been so guilty as some others, Ludendorff, for instance ... and so on. The Crown Prince! A clown, a disgrace to Germany. Nobody had ever loved the Crown Prince—except the women of a certain class.
Bavaria would be much better off separated from the Empire. She was of the opinion that the majority of Bavarians preferred it. At least they did in her circle, though the strict Catholics—she glanced half-way over her shoulder—perhaps did not. Republican, Sparticist, or Bolshevik—it didn’t matter which, so long as they could get good, efficient rulers. So far they had been deplorably weak—no real leaders. The recent uprising in Munich had been something of a nuisance, to be sure. They were rather glad the government troops had come. But the soldiers were mostly Prussians, and once a Prussian gets in you can never pry him out again.
We had reached the village of Hohenkammer, thirty-five kilometers out, which I had chosen as my first stopping-place. My companion of an hour shook hands with what I flattered myself was a gesture of regret that our conversation had been so brief, fell back into step with her movie-and-ragtime-minded husband, and the pair disappeared around the inn that bulged into a sharp turn of the highway.
I entered the invitingly cool and homelike _Gasthaus_ prepared to be coldly turned away. Innkeepers had often been exacting in their demands for credentials during my earlier journeys in Germany. With the first mug of beer, however, the portly landlady gave me permission—one can scarcely use a stronger expression than that for the casual way in which guests are accepted in Bavarian public-houses—to spend the night, and that without so much as referring to registration or proofs of identity. Then, after expressing her placid astonishment that I wanted to see it before bedtime, she sent a muscular, barefoot, but well-scrubbed kitchen-maid to show me into room No. 1 above. It was plainly furnished with two small wooden bedsteads and the prime necessities, looked out on the broad highway and a patch of rolling fields beyond, and was as specklessly clean as are most Bavarian inns.