Augustin; you shan't die." I was not allowed to see very much of
Victoria, but a day or two afterward she sat with me alone for a little
while, and I told her she would be queen if I died.

"No. Mother would kill me," she said with absolute conviction, in no
resentment or fear, but in a simple certitude.

"Why? Because you didn't bring me in when I got wet?"

"Yes--if you died of it," nodded Victoria.

"I don't believe it," I said boldly. "Why shouldn't she like you to be
queen?"

"She'd hate it," said Victoria.

"She doesn't hate me being king."

"You're a boy."

I wondered dimly then, and I have wondered since (hardly with more
knowledge), what truth or whether any lay behind my sister's words; she
believed that, apart from any unjust blame for my misfortune, her mother
would not willingly see her queen. Yet why not? I have a son, and would
be glad to lay down my burden and kiss his hand as he sat on the
throne. Are all fathers such as I? Nay, and are all mothers such as
mine? I know not; and if there be any position that opens a man's mind
to the Socratic wisdom of knowing his own ignorance it is that in which
my life has been spent. But it can hardly be that the curious veiled
opposition which from about this time began to exist between my mother
and my sister was altogether singular. It was a feeling not inconsistent
with duty, with punctilious observance, not even with love; but there
was in it a sort of jealousy, of assertion and counter-assertion. It
seemed to me, as I became older, to have roots deeper than any
accidental occurrence or environment, and, so far, I came near to the
difficult analysis, to spring from the relation of one woman who was
slowly but surely being forced to lay down what she had prized most in
her womanhood and another who, slowly but surely, also became aware that
hers was the prize in her turn, and thrust forward a tentative hand to
grasp it. If I am at all right in this notion, then it is plain that
feelings slight and faint, although not non-existent in ordinary homes,
might be intensified in such a family as ours, and that a new and great
impulse would have been imparted to them by such an artificial
accentuation of the inevitable as must have resulted had I died, and my
sister been called to the first place. Among men the cause for such an
antagonism is far less powerful; advancing years take less from us and
often bring what, to older eyes, is a good recompense for lost y