solutely deficient in feminine elegance or chic, and, while
accomplished, are extremely dull, and not a bit sparkling or witty.

Empress Frederick always declared that her daughter Charlotte was
frivolous, and as much inclined to be forward and rebellious to
discipline and control as her eldest son, the present emperor.
Therefore, as I have already stated, Charlotte and William were
treated by their mother with exceptional severity, were snubbed on
every occasion, often in the most humiliating manner, and were made to
feel that Prince Henry and their younger sisters held a higher place
in the maternal heart than they.

Sad is it to add that the youth of neither William nor Charlotte was
a particularly happy one, and thus it is not astonishing that one as
well as the other should have felt inclined to run a bit wild, like
young colts, when first emancipated from the school-room. It was
during the very few years that intervened between his leaving the
university at Bonn and his marriage, that William obtained his
reputation for dissipation. His shortcomings, due to the exuberance of
youth, were exaggerated until they were transformed from very venial
offences into the most mortal of sins, while in the same way the
delight manifested by Princess Charlotte at the admiration and homage
to which her comeliness gave rise--a very natural feeling when one
recalls the snubbings and humiliations to which she had been subjected
until then--were construed into frivolity and deep-dyed coquetry,
altogether unworthy of a royal princess. She was taxed, too, with an
absence of that simpering modesty, more or less affected, which is
_de mise_ with so many young girls in Germany and in France, when they
make their debut in society, and even her most harmless flirtations
were condemned by her mother as grave indiscretions.

Empress Frederick became very soon imbued with the idea that it was
necessary to marry off Charlotte without delay, in order to avert
the danger, as she conceived it, of one or another of these girlish
flirtations developing into something calculated to compromise both
her dignity and her fair name. Had the princess been less hurried in
this matter, it is probable that she would have found a more suitable
husband, and above all one calculated to capture the fancy of a
young girl, reared at a court which can boast of some of the finest
specimens of manhood in the world. But she was married to the first
princelet who ha