Is that what you have written?  And made a hundred mistakes?  In that case we are just where we were before.  I appreciate that an eighteen-year-old Princess has to consider history, posterity and so forth—­but this conscientiousness will be your ruin.  The King will continue to make a slave of you, the Queen to treat you as a child.  You are the victim of the conflict between two characters who both perhaps desire what is best for you, but who are so totally different that you will never know whom or which one to please.  The Crown Prince has made himself free—­and how did he do it?  Only by courage and independence.  He tore himself loose from the oppressive bondage imposed on him by the caprice of others, and won the means to complete his education.  And now he sends to you from Rheinsberg his friend, the Prince Hereditary of Baireuth, to be a support and protection to you and to the Queen—­so that here in this Court where they drum, trumpet, and parade all day long, you may not finally, in your despair, seize a musket yourself and join the Potsdam Guards!

WILHELMINE.

You have a sense of humor, my dear Sonnsfeld.  It is all well enough for my brother to make plans and send out emissaries, when he is safe in Rheinsberg.  He knows that the path to the freedom he has won led past the very foot of the scaffold.  I am of the sex whose duty it is to be patient.  My father is so good at heart, gentler possibly, in his true self, than is my mother.  She indeed, absorbed in her political ambitions, often turns from me with a harshness that accords ill with mother-love.  It is my fate to endure this life.  Ask yourself, dear friend, how could I trust to a chance adventurous stranger whom my brother sends to me from out of his wild, artistic circle in Rheinsberg—­sends to me to be my knight and paladin?  Such a thought could have been conceived only in the brains of that group of poets.  I’ll confess to you in secret that I should greatly enjoy being in the midst of the Rheinsberg merriment, disguised of course.  But I’m in Berlin—­not in Rheinsberg, and so I have gathered up my meagre scraps of French and thanked the Prince of Baireuth for his offer in a manner which is far more a refusal than an acceptance.

[Hands SONNSFELD the letter.]

SONNSFELD.

And I am to dispatch this letter? [With droll pathos.] No, Your Highness, I cannot have anything to do with this forbidden correspondence.

WILHELMINE.

No joking please, Sonnsfeld.  It was the only answer I could possibly send to the Prince’s tender epistle.

SONNSFELD.

Impossible!—­To become an accomplice to a forbidden correspondence in this Court might cost one’s life.

WILHELMINE.

You will make me angry!—­here, dispatch this letter, and quickly.

SONNSFELD.

No, Princess.  But I know a better means, an absolutely sure means of dispatching the letter to its destination, and that is—­[She glances toward a door in the background] deliver it yourself.