Otterson looked over his shoulder to explain, despairingly:  “The trouble with me is that when I do get a chance to talk English, there’s such a flow of language it carries me away, and I don’t know just where I’m landing.”

XXXIII.

There were several kings and their kindred at Carlsbad that summer.  One day the Duchess of Orleans drove over from Marienbad, attended by the Duke on his bicycle.  After luncheon, they reappeared for a moment before mounting to her carriage with their Secretaries:  two young French gentlemen whose dress and bearing better satisfied Mrs. March’s exacting passion for an aristocratic air in their order.  The Duke was fat and fair, as a Bourbon should be, and the Duchess fatter, though not so fair, as became a Hapsburg, but they were both more plebeian-looking than their retainers, who were slender as well as young, and as perfectly appointed as English tailors could imagine them.

“It wouldn’t do for the very highest sort of Highhotes,” March declared, “to look their own consequence personally; they have to leave that, like everything else, to their inferiors.”

By a happy heterophemy of Mrs. March’s the German Hoheit had now become Highhote, which was so much more descriptive that they had permanently adopted it, and found comfort to their republican pride in the mockery which it poured upon the feudal structure of society.  They applied it with a certain compunction, however, to the King of Servia, who came a few days after the Duke and Duchess:  he was such a young King, and of such a little country.  They watched for him from the windows of the reading-room, while the crowd outside stood six deep on the three sides of the square before the hotel, and the two plain public carriages which brought the King and his suite drew tamely up at the portal, where the proprietor and some civic dignitaries received him.  His moderated approach, so little like that of royalty on the stage, to which Americans are used, allowed Mrs. March to make sure of the pale, slight, insignificant, amiable-looking youth in spectacles as the sovereign she was ambuscading.  Then no appeal to her principles could keep her from peeping through the reading-room door into the rotunda, where the King graciously but speedily dismissed the civic gentlemen and the proprietor, and vanished into the elevator.  She was destined to see him so often afterwards that she scarcely took the trouble to time her dining and supping by that of the simple potentate, who had his meals in one of the public rooms, with three gentlemen of his suite, in sack-coats like himself, after the informal manner of the place.

Still another potentate, who happened that summer to be sojourning abroad, in the interval of a successful rebellion, was at the opera one night with some of his faithful followers.  Burnamy had offered Mrs. March, who supposed that he merely wanted her and her husband with him, places in a box; but after she eagerly accepted, it seemed that he wished her to advise him whether it would do to ask Miss Triscoe and her father to join them.