ad
never displayed that engaging quality, save when, like the baroness,
they were safely asleep in her presence.

But her account of her glories did not have the effect on her new
friends she looked for. As she exposed more and more of the trammeling
net of etiquette in which from her rising to her going to bed she was
enmeshed, their faces did not fill with the envy she would have found
so natural on them; they grew gloomy.

At the end of the interrogation Erebus heaved a great sigh, and said
with heart-felt conviction:

"Well, thank goodness, I'm not a princess! It must be perfectly awful!"

"It must be nearly as bad to be a prince," said the Terror in the
gloomy tone of one who has lost a dear illusion.

The princess could not believe her ears; she stared at the Twins with
parted lips and amazed incredulous eyes. Their words had given her the
shock of her short lifetime. As far as memory carried her back, she
had been assured, frequently and solemnly, that to be a princess, a
German princess, a Hohenzollern princess, was the most glorious and
delightful lot a female human being could enjoy, only a little less
glorious and delightful than the lot of a German prince.

"B-b-but it's sp-p-plendid to be a princess! Everybody says so!" she
stammered.

"They were humbugging you. You've just made it quite clear that it's
horrid in every kind of way. Why, you can't do any single thing you
want to. There's always somebody messing about you to see that you
don't," said Erebus with cold decision.

"B-b-but one is a _p-p-princess_," stammered the princess, with
something of the wild look of one beneath whose feet the firm earth has
suddenly given way.

The Terror perceived her distress; and he set about soothing it.

"You're forgetting the food," he said quickly to Erebus. "I don't
suppose she ever has to eat cold mutton; and I expect she can have all
the sweets and ices she wants."

"Of course," said the princess; and then she went on quickly: "B-b-but
it isn't what you have to eat that makes it so--so--so important being
a princess. It's--"

"But it's awfully important what you have to eat!" cried the Terror.

"I should jolly well think so!" cried Erebus.

The princess tried hard to get back to the moral sublimities of her
exalted station; but the Twins would not have it. They kept her firmly
to the broad human questions of German cookery and sweets. The
princess, used to having information poured