at he never gave an
audience but she was present, either openly or behind a screen.
Danilo's incapacity, however, seems to have stopped short, as we shall
see, at the procuring of cash.

In that same year, 1906, Montenegro's first Skup[vs]tina assembled.
Many people wondered why the autocrat bestowed a Constitution and a
Skup[vs]tina upon his subjects. They for their part--at least the
great majority whose knowledge of the world was gained by looking at
it from their mountain fastnesses--could never for a moment doubt but
that the Montenegrins were the grandest and the noblest of the Serbs.
Hour after hour of peace they spent, disdaining to do any work more
arduous than smoking cigarettes and drinking rakia, and talking,
talking ... they would relate to one another what their ancestors had
done by way of cutting Turkish noses, and unweariedly they would
announce how their own blood was undiluted and heroic. If Greater
Serbia was to be created it was surely they who--but Nikita, their
keen-witted ruler, was not so certain. The Karageorgevi[vc] were no
longer being treated by Europe as outlaws; by his constitutional
methods King Peter had not only effected vast and needed improvements
in his country, but was gradually winning for himself and it, if not a
general esteem, at all events the first approach to that condition
which for so long had been lacking. And Nikita was uneasy. He must
also have a Constitution in his country and a Skup[vs]tina. Very well
he knew that with the inexperience of his people, with their furious
local rivalries and with his power of veto, he would not be greatly
hampered by this Skup[vs]tina. It would be a semblance of modernity.

Nikita had no intention of allowing himself to be put in the shade by
the Prime Minister. Whether it was Tomanovi['c], a kindly man of
straw, or General Martinovi['c], an upright soldier, or anybody
else--their function was to execute the royal orders. The differences
which separate one political party from another in a Balkan State, and
separate them very often into frantically hostile camps, are wont to
be minute as to their principles, for it is largely a question as to
whether you are a devotee of this or of that statesman. Two of the
three parties which existed in Montenegro down to the Great War were
both grouped round the Crown Prince Danilo, and apparently the sole
difference between them was that no member of the Miu[vs]kevi['c]
Cabinet had been in prison. T