was reigning with a persistent industry, a mastery of
detail, and a truthfulness of dealing rare among any rulers, and at
intervals illuminated by sudden glory.

"Woman is the practical sex," said George Meredith, almost with
over-emphasis, and certainly the saying was true of Florence
Nightingale. In far the best appreciation of her that has appeared--an
appreciation written by Harriet Martineau, who herself died about forty
years ago--that distinguished woman says: "She effected two great
things--a mighty reform in the cure of the sick, and an opening for her
sex into the region of serious business." The reform of hospital life
and sick nursing, whether military or civil, is near fulfilment now, and
it is hard to imagine such a scene as those Scutari wards where, in
William Russell's words, the sick were tended by the sick and the dying
by the dying, while rats fed upon the corpses and the filth could not be
described. But though her other and much greater service is, owing to
its very magnitude, still far from fulfilment, it is perhaps even harder
for us to imagine the network of custom, prejudice, and sentiment
through which she forced the opening of which Harriet Martineau speaks.

XXVI

THE PENALTY OF VIRTUE

His crime was that he actually married the girl. It had always been the
fashion for an Austrian Archduke to keep an opera-dancer, whether he
liked it or not, just as he always kept a racehorse, even though he
cared nothing about racing. For any scion of the Imperial House she was
a necessary part of the surroundings, an item in the entourage of Court.
He maintained her just as our Royal Family pay subscriptions to
charities, or lay the foundation-stone of a church. It was expected of
him. _Noblesse oblige_. Descent from the House of Hapsburg involves its
duties as well as its rights. The opera-dancer was as essential to
Archducal existence as the seventy-seventh quartering on the Hapsburg
arms. She was the outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual
Imperialness. She justified the title of "Transparency." She was the
mark of true heredity, like the Hapsburg lip. As the advertisements say,
no Archduke should be without one.

But really to love an opera-dancer was a scandal for derision, moving
all the Courts of the Empire to scorn. Actually to marry her was a crime
beyond forgiveness. It shook the Throne. It came very near the sin of
treason, for which the penalties prescribed may hardly b