her how she supposed she could be otherwise? This
QUESTIONING answer saves a great deal of trouble, and serves two
purposes--i.e. avoids committing oneself, or giving offence by silence.
There was hung in the apartment one portrait, amongst others, that
very much resembled the Duke of D---. I asked Miss Knight whom it
represented. She said that was not known; it had been supposed a
likeness of the Pretender, when young. This answer suited my thoughts so
comically I could have laughed, if one ever did at courts anything but
the contrary of what one was inclined to do.

"Princess Charlotte has a very great variety of expression in her
countenance--a play of features, and a force of muscle, rarely seen in
connection with such soft and shadeless coloring. Her hands and arms
are beautiful; but I think her figure is already gone, and will soon be
precisely like her mother's: in short it is the very picture of her, and
NOT IN MINIATURE. I could not help analyzing my own sensations during
the time I was with her, and thought more of them than I did of her. Why
was I at all flattered, at all more amused, at all more supple to this
young princess, than to her who is only the same sort of person set
in the shade of circumstances and of years? It is that youth, and the
approach of power, and the latent views of self-interest, sway the heart
and dazzle the understanding. If this is so with a heart not, I trust,
corrupt, and a head not particularly formed for interested calculations,
what effect must not the same causes produce on the generality of
mankind?

"In the course of the conversation, the Princess Charlotte contrived to
edge in a good deal of tum-de-dy, and would, if I had entered into
the thing, have gone on with it, while looking at a little picture of
herself, which had about thirty or forty different dresses to put over
it, done on isinglass, and which allowed the general coloring of the
picture to be seen through its transparency. It was, I thought, a pretty
enough conceit, though rather like dressing up a doll. 'Ah!,' said Miss
Knight, 'I am not content though, madame--for I yet should have liked
one more dress--that of the favorite Sultana.'

"'No, no!' said the princess, 'I never was a favorite, and never can be
one,'--looking at a picture which she said was her father's, but which
I do not believe was done for the regent any more than for me, but
represented a young man in a hussar's dress--probably a former favor