oming used to my fears, I do not complain and I accept life
as it comes; I only hope that my boy will also learn to accept it thus.
Perhaps he will learn. Indeed it is not so easy for him, for he will
have to do more than his mother, who, as a woman, can be much more
passive; and it is easier to learn to acquiesce passively than actively.
But the Saints will surely give him strength later to bear his lot and
his crown; this I rely upon. And yet, O Olga, it makes me so immensely
sad that we are sovereigns! But let me not continue in this strain: it
weakens one, it is not right, it is not right....

"There is also a secret reason why I should like to get Othomar away
from Lipara, though it always grieves me so much to part from my
darling. There seems after all to be some truth in those rumours about
the Duchess of Yemena: Oscar asked Myxila about it and he could not deny
it and even said that it was generally known. I do my best not to take
it too much to heart, Olga, but I think it a terrible thing. O God, let
me not think or write about it any more; otherwise it will go whirling
so in my poor head! What can my son see in a woman who is older than his
own mother! What a terrible world, this is, Olga, in which these things
take place; and how can there be such women, whom you and I will never
understand! For, after all, temperament is not everything: every woman
has her own heart; and in that we ought all to see one another; but it
would seem that we can't. In my sadness about this, I prefer to assume
that the woman loves my boy and therefore deceives her husband. Oh, it
is so wicked also of my boy: why need he be like this, he who is
otherwise so good! I just assume that she loves him. Not long ago we had
my last drawing-room, the function with which, as you know, our
winter-season ends; and, when she came up to me and bowed before me and
pressed her lips to my hand, she must have felt my disapproval and my
sadness radiating from my fingers, for she rose out of her curtsey with
a desperate look of anguish in her eyes and a sort of sob in her throat!
I stared at her coldly, but all the same I pitied her, Olga, for, when a
woman of our world is so little able to control herself at a ceremonial
moment, in the presence of her empress, her soul must have sustained a
severe shock: do you not think so too?

"We are now quiet. In a week we are going to our summer-quarters in
Xara, at Castel Xaveria; the weather is already very