e, a member of the House of Prussia declines to yield obedience
to his orders, he is empowered by the statutes of the Hohenzollern
family to suspend the allowances of those guilty of such
insubordination. Thus it is greatly because they are so poor that the
prince and princess invariably travel incognito when they go abroad,
although it has been asserted that the kaiser carries his irritation
against his sister to the extent of declining to permit her to leave
Germany, save on the understanding that neither she nor her husband
will anywhere exact, or receive the honors due to their royal rank.
At the time of the visit of the Emperor and Empress of Germany to
Rome, during the silver-wedding festivities of King Humbert and Queen
Marguerite of Italy, Prince Bernhardt and Princess Charlotte were in
the Eternal City, entirely ignored by the Italian court, as well as by
all the foreign royalties present. Indeed, while the emperor, and even
the pettiest foreign princelets invited for the occasion, were driving
about the streets and parks in royal equipages, the kaiser's sister
and brother-in-law had to content themselves with the dingiest of hack
cabs, and also with the role of ordinary sight-seers.
Those who imagine that Princess Charlotte prefers an incognito role
to that of a royal princess are singularly mistaken. No one is fonder
than she is of the prerogatives of rank, and like all clever and
pretty women, she is ever eager to be the centre of attraction, and
the object of much homage. She cannot, therefore, be said to relish
the treatment and neglect to which she is subjected through her
brother's displeasure.
In the Berlin great world the princess has always been popular, not
merely by reason of her devotion to society, but because a certain
amount of sympathy was felt for her in connection with the treatment
which she had received at the hands of her mother. For some strange
reason or other, Princess Charlotte was never appreciated by her
mother, who showed her preference for her younger daughters in a very
marked manner. Charlotte was always treated with a far greater degree
of strictness than any of the other girls, in spite of her being
vastly superior to them in intellect and in looks. Princess Charlotte
is still a very charming woman, and was in her younger days a
singularly attractive girl, one of the fairest indeed of all Queen
Victoria's numerous descendants, but her sisters are inclined to be
homely, ab
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