e director of the
opera in Paris saw her dance at a child's party at Spa, and offered
me an enormous sum if I would give her up to him and let him have her
educated for the ballet. I said, 'No, I thank you, sir; she is meant
to be something finer than a princesse de theatre.' I had a passionate
belief that she might marry absolutely whom she chose, that she might be
a princess out and out. It has never left me till this hour, and I can
assure you that it has sustained me in many embarrassments. Financial,
some of them; I don't mind confessing it! I have raised money on that
girl's face! I 've taken her to the Jews and bade her put up her veil,
and asked if the mother of that young lady was not safe! She, of course,
was too young to understand me. And yet, as a child, you would have said
she knew what was in store for her; before she could read, she had the
manners, the tastes, the instincts of a little princess. She would have
nothing to do with shabby things or shabby people; if she stained one of
her frocks, she was seized with a kind of frenzy and tore it to pieces.
At Nice, at Baden, at Brighton, wherever we stayed, she used to be sent
for by all the great people to play with their children. She has played
at kissing-games with people who now stand on the steps of thrones! I
have gone so far as to think at times that those childish kisses were a
sign--a symbol--a portent. You may laugh at me if you like, but have n't
such things happened again and again without half as good a cause, and
does n't history notoriously repeat itself? There was a little Spanish
girl at a second-rate English boarding-school thirty years ago!... The
Empress certainly is a pretty woman; but what is my Christina, pray? I
've dreamt of it, sometimes every night for a month. I won't tell you
I have been to consult those old women who advertise in the newspapers;
you 'll call me an old imbecile. Imbecile if you please! I have refused
magnificent offers because I believed that somehow or other--if wars and
revolutions were needed to bring it about--we should have nothing less
than that. There might be another coup d'etat somewhere, and another
brilliant young sovereign looking out for a wife! At last, however,"
Mrs. Light proceeded with incomparable gravity, "since the overturning
of the poor king of Naples and that charming queen, and the expulsion
of all those dear little old-fashioned Italian grand-dukes, and the
dreadful radical talk that is g