hand, thereby rehabilitating me with my entourage waiting outside.

Meanwhile Frederick Augustus had a "critical quarter of an hour" with
father-in-law, who assumed to speak on behalf of the King.

"The King," he said, "despised 'playing to the gallery' worse than the
devil hated holy water." (This court is overrun with Jesuits, and we
must needs adopt their vernacular.)

The King, he repeated, thought it very bad taste for anyone to take the
centre of the stage in these "popularity-comedies," and he told a lot
more lies of the same character. Then he bethought himself of his own
grieved authority.

"Tell your wife," he said, "that I, her father-in-law, and next to the
throne, do everything in my power to escape such turbulent scenes, and
that I would rather ride about town in an ordinary _Droschke_ (cab) of
the second class, preserving my incognito, than in a state carriage and
be the object of popular acclamation."

When Frederick Augustus repeated the above with the most solemn face in
the world, I thought I would die with laughter and actually had to send
for my tire-woman to let my corset out a few notches.

"The old monkey," I cried--"as if he wasn't after '_Hochs_' morning,
noon and night; as if he thought of anything else when he mounts a
carriage or his horse."

"You forget yourself, Louise," warned Frederick Augustus in the voice of
an undertaker, and I really think he meant it. But I wasn't in the mood
to be silenced.

"And as if I didn't know that, like Kaiser Wilhelm, he keeps a record of
towns and villages that were never honored by one of his visits,
intending to make his ceremonial entry there at the first plausible
opportunity."

"It isn't true," insisted Frederick Augustus.

Then I got angry. "It may be thought polite in the bosom of your family
to call one another a liar," I retorted, "but don't you get into the
habit of introducing those tap-room manners in the _menage_ of an
Imperial Highness of Austria. I forbid it."

And then I gave rein to some of the bitterness that had accumulated in
my heart against the old man. Didn't I know that George was mad enough
to quarrel with his dinner when, on his drives about town, he observed a
single person refusing to salute him? And wasn't it a fact that the
Socialists had combined never more to raise their hats to him just
because he insisted on it? And wasn't that one of the reasons why the
government was more hard on them than happened to be p