The Princess Aline | Page 3

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THE PRINCESS ALINE
BY
RICHARD HARDING DAVIS

THE PRINCESS ALINE
I

H. R. H. the Princess Aline of Hohenwald came into the life of Morton
Carlton--or "Morney" Carlton, as men called him--of New York city,
when that young gentleman's affairs and affections were best suited to
receive her. Had she made her appearance three years sooner or three
years later, it is quite probable that she would have passed on out of his
life with no more recognition from him than would have been

expressed in a look of admiring curiosity.
But coming when she did, when his time and heart were both
unoccupied, she had an influence upon young Mr. Carlton which led
him into doing several wise and many foolish things, and which
remained with him always. Carlton had reached a point in his life, and
very early in his life, when he could afford to sit at ease and look back
with modest satisfaction to what he had forced himself to do, and
forward with pleasurable anticipations to whatsoever he might choose
to do in the future. The world had appreciated what he had done, and
had put much to his credit, and he was prepared to draw upon this
grandly.
At the age of twenty he had found himself his own master, with
excellent family connections, but with no family, his only relative
being a bachelor uncle, who looked at life from the point of view of the
Union Club's windows, and who objected to his nephew's leaving
Harvard to take up the study of art in Paris. In that city (where at
Julian's he was nicknamed the junior Carlton, for the obvious reason
that he was the older of the two Carltons in the class, and because he
was well dressed) he had shown himself a harder worker than others
who were less careful of their appearance and of their manners. His
work, of which he did not talk, and his ambitions, of which he also did
not talk, bore fruit early, and at twenty-six he had become a
portrait-painter of international reputation. Then the French
government purchased one of his paintings at an absurdly small figure,
and placed it in the Luxembourg, from whence it would in time depart
to be buried in the hall of some provincial city; and American
millionaires, and English Lord Mayors, members of Parliament, and
members of the Institute, masters of hounds in pink coats, and
ambassadors in gold lace, and beautiful women of all nationalities and
conditions sat before his easel. And so when he returned to New York
he was welcomed with an enthusiasm which showed that his
countrymen had feared that the artistic atmosphere of the Old World
had stolen him from them forever. He was particularly silent, even at
this date, about his work, and listened to what others had to say of it
with much awe, not unmixed with some amusement, that it should be

he who was capable of producing anything worthy of such praise. We
have been told what the mother duck felt when her ugly duckling
turned into a swan, but we have never considered how much the ugly
duckling must have marvelled also.
"Carlton is probably the only living artist," a brother artist had said of
him, "who fails to appreciate how great his work is." And on this being
repeated to Carlton by a good-natured friend, he had replied cheerfully,
"Well, I'm sorry, but it is certainly better to be the only one who doesn't
appreciate it than to be the only one who does."
He had never understood why such a responsibility had been intrusted
to him. It was, as he expressed it, not at all in his line, and young girls
who sought to sit at the feet of the master found him making love to
them in the most charming manner in the world, as though he were not
entitled to all the rapturous admiration