would never forgive her; she would drop at once from her high estate into those depths in his opinion where the dull average of both sexes sprawled for ever in indiscriminate heaps.  Priscilla never dreamed of wavering.  She, most poetic of princesses, made apparently of ivory and amber, outwardly so cool and serene and gentle, was inwardly on fire.  The fire, I should add, burnt with a very white flame.  Nothing in the shape of a young man had ever had the stoking of it.  It was that whitest of flames that leaps highest at the thought of abstractions—­freedom, beauty of life, simplicity, and the rest.  This, I would remark, is a most rare light to find burning in a woman’s breast.  What she was, however, Fritzing had made her.  True the material had been extraordinarily good, and for ten years he had done as he liked with it.  Beginning with the simpler poems of Wordsworth—­he detested them, but they were better than soiling her soul with Longfellow and Mrs. Hemans—­those lessons in English literature, meant by the authorities to be as innocuous to her as to her sisters, had opened her eyes in a way nothing else could have done to the width of the world and the littleness of Kunitz.  With that good teacher, as eager to lead as she to follow, she wandered down the splendid walks of culture, met there the best people of all ages, communed with mighty souls, heard how they talked, saw how they lived, and none, not one, lived and talked as they lived and talked at Kunitz.

Imagine a girl influenced for ten years, ten of her softest most wax-like years, by a Fritzing, taught to love freedom, to see the beauty of plain things, of quietness, of the things appertaining to the spirit, taught to see how ignoble it is, how intensely, hopelessly vulgar to spend on one’s own bodily comforts more than is exactly necessary, taught to see a vision of happiness possible only to those who look to their minds for their joys and not to their bodies, imagine how such a girl, hearing these things every afternoon almost of her life, would be likely to regard the palace mornings and evenings, the ceremonies and publicity, all those hours spent as though she were a celebrated picture, forced everlastingly to stand in an attitude considered appropriate and smile while she was being looked at.

“No one,” she said one day to Fritzing, “who hasn’t himself been a princess can have the least idea of what it is like.”

“Ma’am, it would be more correct to say herself in place of himself.”

“Well, they can’t,” said Priscilla.

“Ma’am, to begin a sentence with the singular and continue it with the plural is an infraction of all known rules.”

“But the sentiments, Fritzi—­what do you think of the sentiments?”

“Alas, ma’am, they too are an infraction of rules.”

“What is not in this place, I should like to know?” sighed Priscilla, her chin on her hand, her eyes on that distant line of hills beyond which, she told herself, lay freedom.