ut there was no one
else to tell the joke to, and I had it all each night before I slept.

But now Victoria was sixteen; and Krak, elderly, pensioned, but
unbroken, was gone. She went back to Styria to chasten and ultimately to
enrich (I would not for the world have been privy to their prayers) some
nephews and nieces. It seemed strange, but Krak was homesick for Styria.
She went; Victoria gave her the tribute of a tear, surprised out of her
before she remembered her causes for exultation. Then came their memory,
and she was outrageously triumphant. A new era began; the buffer was
gone; my mother and Victoria were face and face. And in a year as
Victoria said, in two or three as my mother allowed, Victoria would be
grown up.

I was myself, most unwillingly, a cause of annoyance to Victoria, and a
pretext for her repression. Importance flowed in on me unasked,
unearned. To speak in homely fashion, she was always "a bad second," and
none save herself attributed to her the normal status of privileges of
an elder sister. Her wrath was not visited on me, but on those who
exalted me so unduly; even while she resented my position she was not,
as I have shown, above using it for her own ends; this adaptability was
not due to guile; she forgot one mood when another came, and compromised
her pretensions in the effort to compass her desires. Princess Heinrich
seized on the inconsistency, and pointed it out to her daughter with an
exasperating lucidity.

"You are ready enough to remember that Augustin is king when you want
anything from him," she would observe. "You forget it only when you are
asked to give way to him."

Victoria would make no reply--the Krak traditions endured to prevent an
answer to rebukes--but when we were alone she used to remark, "I should
think an iceberg's rather like a mother. Only one needn't live with
icebergs."

Quite suddenly, as it seemed, it occurred to Victoria that she was
pretty. She lost no time in advertising the discovery through the medium
of a thousand new tricks and graces; a determined assault on the
affections of all the men about us, from the lords-in-waiting down to
the stablemen--an assault that ignored existing domestic ties or
pre-arranged affections--was the next move in her campaign. When she was
extremely angry with her mother she would say, "How odious it must be
not to be young any more!" I thought that there was sometimes a wistful
look in my mother's eyes; was she thinkin