tion.... Othomar will make an effort to keep him,
though he himself realizes that it will not be possible.... And the
revision of the constitution in the immediate future, with so many
drastic changes, probably with the inauguration of the upper and lower
chambers, while the house of peers will continue its outward existence,
but will be actually nothing more than an honorary consulting body.
These are concessions, if you will have it so, but then, you know,
Othomar has quite different ideas from his father's and, when he makes
these concessions, he undoubtedly makes them to the past and not to the
future nor to himself....

"Life is cruel, cruel in its changes and cruel even in its renascences;
and for us rulers all this is perhaps even more cruel; but the world
belongs to the future....

"The Empress Elizabeth is still here: she has suddenly grown so old, so
grey and very dull and depressed; and she does not know what to do:
whether to remain with her household at the Imperial, to stay on here at
St. Ladislas, or to retire to Castel Xaveria.... All the imperial
palaces and castles are whirling through her poor head: her private
properties and the crown domains; she does not know where she wants to
go; we of course continue to urge her not to leave the Imperial: it is
large enough to enable her to retain almost all her own military and
civil household....

"Dearest mother, I will write to you again soon: my head is still too
much in a whirl; I have touched on too many topics; my woman's brains
are not capable of thinking that all out logically and coherently and
writing it down.... And I have only been empress for such a short time
and I am only twenty-two, though I no longer feel so young.... This
letter is but a hurriedly-written reply to your doleful self-reproach,
which I now beseech you in Heaven's name to put aside _entirely_. Now
that I write this to you, the evening of my betrothal-dinner at
Sigismundingen rises before my mind. We were such a strange engaged
couple, Othomar and I! I asked him--smile at this, mamma, and don't cry
about it--whether he loved anybody. He said no. He told me he loved his
people and he stretched out his arms, as though he would have embraced
them. His people! The dawn of a new idea--old no doubt to thousands and
ages old, but new to me, as a new day is new--shone out before me, threw
light over my gloomy sufferings, brightened a road before me....

"That road, mamma, I now see st