d on my foot just here, so I stopped, but, to his and my
surprise, Mrs. Jimmie not only agreed with me, but added:

"What a misfortune it is that princes and kings and queens must marry
for state reasons, so that love can play no part."

I don't know whether Von Engel had not then put two and two together, so
that he knew that Mrs. Jimmie had her own husband in mind when she made
that speech about love or not. I think not, for I happened to be looking
at him, and for a moment I thought he was going to spring from his
horse right into her lap.

To me the two loveliest women rulers of the world, the ones whose
histories I most grieve over, and with whose temperaments I am most in
sympathy, are the Empress Eugenie of the French and the Empress
Elizabeth of Austria. The Empress Elizabeth was of such a high-strung,
nervous, proud temperament that had there not been madness in her
unfortunate family, all her apparently unbalanced acts could be
accounted for by her imperious and imperial nature, and the stigma of a
mind even partially unbalanced need never have been hers. Many a wife in
the common walks of life has been driven to more insane acts in the eyes
of an unfeeling and critical world than ever the unhappy Empress
Elizabeth committed, and for the same causes. An inhumanly tyrannical
mother-in-law, the most vicious of her vicious kind, whose chief delight
was to torture the high-strung nature she was too small to comprehend; a
husband, encouraged in his not-to-be-borne gallantries by his own
mother, this same monstrous mother-in-law of the Empress; her
children's love aborted by this same fiend in woman form--is it any
marvel that the proud Empress broke away from her splendid torture and
found a sad comfort in travel and study? The wonder of it is that she
chose so mild a remedy. She might have murdered her husband's mother,
and those who knew would have declared her justified. If she had done so
she could scarcely have suffered in her mind more than she did.

When I expressed some of these opinions I discovered that both officers
looked at me with undisguised sympathy. They themselves dared not put
into words such incendiary thoughts, but they welcomed their expression
from another. This was not the first time I had worded the inner
thoughts of a company who dared not speak out themselves, but, as
catspaws are invariably burned, I cannot lay to my soul the flattering
unction that I have escaped their common lot. Be