Page:Scented isles and coral gardens- Torres Straits, German New Guinea and the Dutch East Indies, by C.D. Mackellar, 1912.pdf/213

Rh her high-minded, far-seeing, patriotic endeavours to stir up interest in the Fatherland in German colonisation would have met with public recognition. As it is, I trust that yet some day Germany will recognise her patriotic work, and that, in that German South African possession she loved so well and worked for, they will erect a monument to her memory. A woman of many sorrows, she once wrote to me, “You write tragedies; I live them”: and it was true.

It will not be forgotten in Germany how, during the trial of Carl Peters, when the country was roused to indignation at the public insult offered “a noble woman” by the Socialists, she bravely, in the face of the world, proclaimed her feelings for Carl Peters and the friendship subsisting between them for many years. Once—long years before this—she had hoped to marry him—this is no indiscreet revelation, for she often spoke of it but they mutually agreed that friendship alone was all they cared for. Corresponding with her through many years, I always knew and saw that what really attracted her in Carl Peters was not the man, but the position and power he had; her one-time desire to join her fate with his was the idea that, as the wife of the Governor of a great province, she would be enabled to work with him to accomplish some of her great aims for the development and advancement of those new German lands. By birth she was the social superior of Carl Peters, as she was in other ways; but the power he one time exercised glamoured her, and she saw herself, as we often jestingly called her, “Queen of Africa.” Every one who knew her regretted deeply the untimely fate of this gifted woman. She was for a short time lady-in-waiting to the Queen of Roumania, in succession to Mademoiselle Vacaresco; but Africa