The Princess Priscillas Fortnight | Page 5

would
drop at once from her high estate into those depths in his opinion where
the dull average of both sexes sprawled for ever in indiscriminate heaps.
Priscilla never dreamed of wavering. She, most poetic of princesses,
made apparently of ivory and amber, outwardly so cool and serene and
gentle, was inwardly on fire. The fire, I should add, burnt with a very
white flame. Nothing in the shape of a young man had ever had the
stoking of it. It was that whitest of flames that leaps highest at the
thought of abstractions--freedom, beauty of life, simplicity, and the rest.
This, I would remark, is a most rare light to find burning in a woman's
breast. What she was, however, Fritzing had made her. True the
material had been extraordinarily good, and for ten years he had done
as he liked with it. Beginning with the simpler poems of
Wordsworth--he detested them, but they were better than soiling her
soul with Longfellow and Mrs. Hemans--those lessons in English
literature, meant by the authorities to be as innocuous to her as to her
sisters, had opened her eyes in a way nothing else could have done to
the width of the world and the littleness of Kunitz. With that good

teacher, as eager to lead as she to follow, she wandered down the
splendid walks of culture, met there the best people of all ages,
communed with mighty souls, heard how they talked, saw how they
lived, and none, not one, lived and talked as they lived and talked at
Kunitz.
Imagine a girl influenced for ten years, ten of her softest most wax-like
years, by a Fritzing, taught to love freedom, to see the beauty of plain
things, of quietness, of the things appertaining to the spirit, taught to
see how ignoble it is, how intensely, hopelessly vulgar to spend on
one's own bodily comforts more than is exactly necessary, taught to see
a vision of happiness possible only to those who look to their minds for
their joys and not to their bodies, imagine how such a girl, hearing
these things every afternoon almost of her life, would be likely to
regard the palace mornings and evenings, the ceremonies and publicity,
all those hours spent as though she were a celebrated picture, forced
everlastingly to stand in an attitude considered appropriate and smile
while she was being looked at.
"No one," she said one day to Fritzing, "who hasn't himself been a
princess can have the least idea of what it is like."
"Ma'am, it would be more correct to say herself in place of himself."
"Well, they can't," said Priscilla.
"Ma'am, to begin a sentence with the singular and continue it with the
plural is an infraction of all known rules."
"But the sentiments, Fritzi--what do you think of the sentiments?"
"Alas, ma'am, they too are an infraction of rules."
"What is not in this place, I should like to know?" sighed Priscilla, her
chin on her hand, her eyes on that distant line of hills beyond which,
she told herself, lay freedom.
She had long ago left off saying it only to herself. I think she must have

been about eighteen when she took to saying it aloud to Fritzing. At
first, before he realized to what extent she was sick for freedom, he had
painted in glowing colours the delights that lay on the other side of the
hills, or for that matter on this side of them if you were alone and not a
princess. Especially had he dwelt on the glories of life in England,
glories attainable indeed only by the obscure such as he himself had
been, and for ever impossible to those whom Fate obliges to travel in
state carriages and special trains. Then he had come to scent danger and
had grown wary; trying to put her off with generalities, such as the
inability of human beings to fly from their own selves, and
irrelevancies such as the amount of poverty and wretchedness to be
observed in the east of London; refusing to discuss France, which she
was always getting to as the first step towards England, except in as far
as it was a rebellious country that didn't like kings; pointing out with no
little temper that she had already seen England; and finishing by
inquiring very snappily when her Grand Ducal Highness intended to go
on with her drawing.
Now what Priscilla had seen of England had been the insides of
Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle; of all insides surely the most
august. To and from these she had been conveyed in closed carriages
and royal trains, and there was so close a family likeness between them
and Kunitz that to her extreme discomfort she had felt herself
completely at