m, even as the oyster within
its shell deposits luster upon the pearls which a sort of hereditary
disease has placed within its keeping? "Renewed significance?" But in
what respect had the significance of the royal office become obscured?
Was anything that he did insignificant? "Symbol and safeguard of the
popular will?" Yes: if his Coronation oath meant anything. But how was
he, symbol and safeguard and all the rest of it, to find out what the
popular will really was? No man in all the Kingdom was so much cut off
from living contact with the popular will as was he!

The King was in his study, the room in which most of the routine work
of his daily life was accomplished--a large square chamber with three
windows to one side looking out across a well-timbered park toward a
distant group of towers. But for those towers, so civic in their
character, it might well have been taken for a country view; scarcely a
roof was visible.

Upon a large desk in the center of the chamber lay a pile of official
letters and documents awaiting his perusal; and he knew that in the
adjoining room one of his private secretaries was even now attending his
call. But from none of his secretaries could he learn anything about the
popular will.

He walked to a window and stood looking out into the soft sunlit air,
slightly misty in quality, which lay over the distances of his capital.
Away behind those trees, beneath those towers, sending toward him a
ceaseless reverberation of bells, wheels, street cries, and all the
countless noises of city life, went a vast and teeming population of men
and women, already far advanced on the round of their daily toil. He was
in their midst, but not one of them could he see; and not one of them
did he really know as man to man. Everything that he learned about their
lives came to him at second or at third hand; nor did actual contact
bring him any closer, for wherever he moved among them they knew who he
was and behaved accordingly. For twenty-five years he had not walked in
a single one of those streets the nearest of which lay within a stone's
throw of his palace. As a youth, before his father came to the throne,
he had sometimes gone about, with or without companions, just like an
ordinary person, taking his chance of being recognized: it had not
mattered then. But now it could not be done: people did not expect it of
him; his ministers would have regarded it as a dangerous and expensive
habit, requiring a