Here the conversation opened to let me in.  More than once the margravine informed me that I was not the equal of my father.

‘Why,’ said she, ’why can’t you undertake this detestable coal-mine, and let your father disport himself?’

I suggested that it might be because I was not his equal.  She complimented me for inheriting a spark of Roy’s brilliancy.

I fancied there was a conspiracy to force me back from my pretensions by subjecting me to the contemplation of my bare self and actual condition.  Had there been, I should have suffered from less measured strokes.  The unconcerted design to humiliate inferiors is commonly successfuller than conspiracy.

The prince invited me to smoke with him, and talked of our gradual subsidence in England to one broad level of rank through the intermixture by marriage of our aristocracy, squirearchy, and merchants.

‘Here it is not so,’ he said; ’and no democratic rageings will make it so.  Rank, with us, is a principle.  I suppose you have not read the Professor’s book?  It is powerful—­he is a powerful man.  It can do no damage to the minds of persons destined by birth to wield authority—­ none, therefore, to the princess.  I would say to you—­avoid it.  For those who have to carve their way, it is bad.  You will enter your Parliament, of course?  There you have a fine career.’

He asked me what I had made of Chancellor von Redwitz.

I perceived that Prince Ernest could be cool and sagacious in repairing what his imprudence or blindness had left to occur:  that he must have enlightened his daughter as to her actual position, and was most dexterously and devilishly flattering her worldly good sense by letting it struggle and grow, instead of opposing her.  His appreciation of her intellect was an idolatry; he really confided in it, I knew; and this reacted upon her.  Did it?  My hesitations and doubts, my fantastic raptures and despair, my loss of the power to appreciate anything at its right value, revealed the madness of loving a princess.

There were preparations for the arrival of an important visitor.  The margravine spoke of him emphatically.  I thought it might be her farcically pompous way of announcing my father’s return, and looked pleased, I suppose, for she added, ’Do you know Prince Hermann?  He spends most of his time in Eberhardstadt.  He is cousin of the King, a wealthy branch; tant soit peu philosophe, a ce qu’on dit; a traveller.  They say he has a South American complexion.  I knew him a boy; and his passion is to put together what Nature has unpieced, bones of fishes and animals.  Il faut passer le temps.  He adores the Deluge.  Anything antediluvian excites him.  He can tell us the “modes” of those days; and, if I am not very much misinformed, he still expects us to show him the very latest of these.  Happily my milliner is back from Paris.  Ay, and we have fossils in our neighbourhood, though, on my honour, I don’t know where—­somewhere; the princess can guide him, and you can help at the excavations.  I am told he would go through the crust of earth for the backbone of an idio—­ilio-something-saurus.’