p.'

'See there the way with your free-thinkers! They commence by treading
under foot the pleasantest half of life, and then they impose their bad
habits on their victims. Ottilia! Ernest! I do insist upon having lights
extinguished in the child's apartments by twelve o'clock at midnight.'

'Twelve o'clock is an extraordinary latitude for children,' said
Ottilia, smiling.

The prince, with a scarce perceptible degree of emphasis, said,

'Women born to rule must be held exempt from nursery restrictions.'

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