ou; and I think, if you will not be angry with me
for saying so, that you greatly need taking care of."

"Well, then," said Anna, with an effort, "let us try it for three
months."

An immense load was lifted off the princess's heart by these words. "You
will not regret it," she said emphatically.

But Anna was not so sure. Though she did her best to put a cheerful face
on her new bargain, she could not help fearing that her enterprise had
begun badly. She was unusually pensive throughout the evening.

CHAPTER XIII

What the Princess Ludwig thought of her new place it would be difficult
to say. She accepted her position as minister to the comforts of the
hitherto comfortless without remark and entirely as a matter of course.
She got up at hours exemplary in their earliness, and was about the
house rattling a bunch of keys all day long. She was wholly practical,
and as destitute of illusions as she was of education in the ordinary
sense. Her knowledge of German literature was hardly more extensive than
Letty's, and of other tongues and other literatures she knew and cared
nothing. As for illusions, she saw things as they are, and had never at
any period of her life possessed enthusiasms. Nor had she the least
taste for hidden meanings and symbols. Maeterlinck, if she had heard of
him, would have been dismissed by her with an easy smile. Anna's
whitewash to her was whitewash; a disagreeable but economical
wall-covering. She knew and approved of it as cheap; how could she dream
that it was also symbolic? She never dreamed at all, either sleeping or
waking. If by some chance she had fallen into musings, she would have
mused blood and iron, the superiority of the German nation, cookery in
its three forms _feine_, _buergerliche_, and _Hausmannskost_, in all
which forms she was preeminent in skill--she would have mused, that is,
on facts, plain and undisputed. If she had had children she would have
made an excellent mother; as it was she made excellent cakes--also a
form of activity to be commended. She was a Dettingen before her
marriage, and the Dettingens are one of the oldest Prussian families,
and have produced more first-rate soldiers and statesmen and a larger
number of mothers of great men than any other family in that part. The
Penheims and Dettingens had intermarried continually, and it was to his
mother's Dettingen blood that the first [German: Fuerst] Penheim owed the
energy that procured him his elevat