The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Princess Aline, by Richard Harding Davis

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Title: The Princess Aline

Author: Richard Harding Davis

Release Date: May 6, 2008 [EBook #327]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PRINCESS ALINE ***

THE PRINCESS ALINE

BY

RICHARD HARDING DAVIS

THE PRINCESS ALINE

I

H. R. H. the Princess Aline of Hohenwald came into the life of Morton
Carlton--or "Morney" Carlton, as men called him--of New York city, when
that young gentleman's affairs and affections were best suited to
receive her. Had she made her appearance three years sooner or three
years later, it is quite probable that she would have passed on out of
his life with no more recognition from him than would have been
expressed in a look of admiring curiosity.

But coming when she did, when his time and heart were both unoccupied,
she had an influence upon young Mr. Carlton which led him into doing
several wise and many foolish things, and which remained with him
always. Carlton had reached a point in his life, and very early in his
life, when he could afford to sit at ease and look back with modest
satisfaction to what he had forced himself to do, and forward with
pleasurable anticipations to whatsoever he might choose to do in the
future. The world had appreciated what he had done, and had put much
to his credit, and he was prepared to draw upon this grandly.

At the age of twenty he had found himself his own master, with
excellent family connections, but with no family, his only relative
being a bachelor uncle, who looked at life from the point of view of
the Union Club's windows, and who objected to his nephew's leaving
Harvard to take up the study of art in Paris. In that city (where at
Julian's he was nicknamed the junior Carlton, for the obvious reason
that he was the older of the two Carltons in the class, and because he
was well dressed) he had shown himself a harder worker than others who
were less careful of their appearance and of their manners. His work,
of which he did not talk, and his ambitions, of which he also did not
talk, bore fruit early, and at tw