conditions. Had Philippa of Hainault lived in these
more enlightened times she would have been forced to let the Burghers of
Calais go hang and restrict herself to making provision for their widows
and orphans; for to arrest any act of government had long since ceased
to be within the functions of a queen.

Like her husband, this royal lady was surrounded by officialdom, or,
rather, by its complementary and feminine appendices--the wives and
daughters of the aristocracy, of politicians, of ecclesiastical and
military dignitaries: these to her represented the sphere, activity, and
capacity of her own sex. Other women--pioneers of education and of
reform, rescue-workers, organizers, writers, orators, had--the majority
of them--lived and died without once coming in contact with the official
leader of Jingalese womanhood; for they and their like were outside the
official ranks, and stood for things combative and controversial and
dangerously alive, and only a few of them had been brought to Court in
their venerable old age, to be looked at as curiosities when their
fighting days were over and their work done.

On the governing boards of the hospitals to which the Queen gave her
patronage there was not a single woman--or a married one either; but
when her Majesty visited the wards she was very nice to the nurses. She
was, in fact, very nice to everybody, and everybody was very nice to
her.

IV

A king and a queen take so long to describe that the reader will have
almost forgotten how we left them at the breakfast table. But the Queen
had her letters and the King his newspapers, and there, when we return
to them in the historic present, they still are.

Yes, there they sit, an institutional expression of the nation's general
complacence with the state of civilization at which it has arrived,
interpreting in decorous form the voice of the articulate majority--the
inarticulate not being interpreted at all. There they sit, he with his
newspapers, she with her letters: the King a little anxious and
perturbed, the Queen not anxious or perturbed about anything.

She was still enjoying her superfluous correspondence, he studying in a
vague distrustfulness the various organs of public opinion which lay
around him, doubtful of them all, yet wishing to find one he could rely
on. For now they were all very full of the approaching constitutional
crisis, and were adumbrating in respectful, yet slightly menacing terms,
what the Ki