the talk rather bashfully but kindly, and always the subject was impersonal and of indifferent interest.  He made no sign that the interview was over, but we knew, as well as though a gong had struck, when to go.  So we went, and it seemed to me that the Duke put more real enthusiasm into his good-bye than into his welcome.  It was half-past five.  He had been at work since eight.  And perhaps it was fancy, but there seemed to be rising into his bland Italian eye a determination to knock off and take a half holiday.

We noticed that his desk was clean, as clean as General Pershing’s or Major Murphy’s in Paris, or President Wilson’s in Washington.  Then it came to us that the king’s job, after all, is a desk job.  The king who used to go around ruling with a sceptre has given place to a gentleman in a business suit who probably rings for his stenographer and dictates in part as follows:  “Yours of even date received and contents noted; in reply will say!” We carried away an impression that the lot of royalty, like the policeman’s lot, “is not a happy one.”  Talking it all over, we decided that in the modern world there is really any amount more fun running a newspaper than being a king, and for the size of the town, much more chance of getting things done.  It did not fall to me because of an illness, but a few days later it fell to Henry and Medill to see a real king at Udine.  He was living in a cottage a few miles out of town in a quiet little grove that protected him from airplanes.  Now Henry’s nearest brush to royalty was two years ago when in the New York suffrage campaign his oratory had brought him the homage of some of the rich and the great.  Kings really weren’t so much of a treat to Medill, who had taken his fill of them in childhood when his father was minister to England.  But nevertheless they lorded it over me when they saw me because the king wasn’t on my calling list.  But they couldn’t keep from me the sad fact that they had started out to make the royal call without gloves—­hoping probably to catch the king with their bare hands—­and had been turned back by the Italian colonel who had them in charge.  Henry once sang in the cantata of “Queen Esther,” and Medill insists that all the way up to the royal cottage Henry kept carolling under his breath the song:  “Then go thou merrily, then go thou merrily, unto the king!” and also:  “Haman, Haman, long live Haman, he is the favoured one in all the king’s dominions!” just to show that finical colonel who took them back to Udine for gloves that Wichita was no stranger to the inside politics of the court.  However, gloves seemed to be the only ceremonial frill required, and they went to the king’s business office as informally as they would go to the private room of a soap-maker in Cincinnati.  They found the king a soft-spoken little man.  Henry said he looked very much like the mayor of Kansas City, and was equally unassuming and considerate.  He asked his guests what had