a called
him Fritzi when her lady-in-waiting dozed; dearest Fritzi sometimes
even, in the heat of protest or persuasion. But afterwards, leaving
the room as solemnly as she had come in, followed by her wide-awake
attendant, she would nod a formally gracious "Good afternoon, Herr
Geheimrath," for all the world as though she had been talking that way
the whole time. The Countess (her lady-in-waiting was the Countess
Irmgard von Disthal, an ample slow lady, the unmarried daughter of a
noble house, about fifty at this time, and luckily--or unluckily--for
Priscilla, a great lover of much food and its resultant deep slumbers)
would bow in her turn in as stately a manner as her bulk permitted,
and with a frigidity so pronounced that in any one less skilled in
shades of deportment it would have resembled with a singular
completeness a sniff of scorn. Her frigidity was perfectly justified.
Was she not a _hochgeboren_, a member of an ancient house, of luminous
pedigree as far back as one could possibly see? And was he not the son
of an obscure Westphalian farmer, a person who in his youth had sat
barefoot watching pigs? It is true he had learning, and culture, and a
big head with plenty of brains in it, and the Countess Disthal had a
small head, hardly any brains, no soul to speak of, and no education.
This, I say, is true; but it is also neither here nor there. The
Countess was the Countess, and Fritzing was a nobody, and the
condescension she showed him was far more grand ducal than anything in
that way that Priscilla could or ever did produce.

Fritzing, unusually gifted, and enterprising from the first--which
explains the gulf between pig-watching and _Hofbibliothekar_--had
spent ten years in Paris and twenty in England in various capacities,
but always climbing higher in the world of intellect, and had come
during this climbing to speak English quite as well as most
Englishmen, if in a statelier, Johnsonian manner. At fifty he began
his career in Kunitz, and being a lover of children took over the
English education of the three princesses; and now that they had long
since learned all they cared to know, and in Priscilla's case all of
grammar at least that he had to teach, he invented a talent for
drawing in Priscilla, who could not draw a straight line, much less a
curved one, so that she should still be able to come to the library as
often as she chose on the pretext of taking a drawing-lesson. The
Grand Duke's idea about