The Princess Priscillas Fortnight | Page 7

left, she informed him, altogether to Fritzing. After having spent
several anxious days, she told him, considering whether she ought to
dye her hair black in order to escape recognition, or stay her own
colour but disguise herself as a man and buy a golden beard, she had
decided that these were questions Fritzing would settle better than she
could. "I'd dye my hair at once," she said, "but what about my wretched

eyelashes? Can one dye eyelashes?"
Fritzing thought not, and anyhow was decidedly of opinion that her
eyelashes should not be tampered with; I think I have said that they
were very lovely. He also entirely discouraged the idea of dressing as a
man. "Your Grand Ducal Highness would only look like an extremely
conspicuous boy," he assured her.
"I could wear a beard," said Priscilla.
But Fritzing was absolutely opposed to the beard.
As for the money part, she never thought of it. Money was a thing she
never did think about. It also, then, was to be Fritzing's business.
Possibly things might have gone on much longer as they were, with a
great deal of planning and talking, and no doing, if an exceedingly
desirable prince had not signified his intention of marrying Priscilla.
This had been done before by quite a number of princes. They had, that
is, not signified, but implored. On their knees would they have
implored if their knees could have helped them. They were however all
poor, and Priscilla and her sisters were rich; and how foolish, said the
Grand Duke, to marry poor men unless you are poor yourself. The
Grand Duke, therefore, took these young men aside and crushed them,
while Priscilla, indifferent, went on with her drawing. But now came
this one who was so eminently desirable that he had no need to do more
than merely signify. There had been much trouble and a great deal of
delay in finding him a wife, for he had insisted on having a princess
who should be both pretty and not his cousin. Europe did not seem to
contain such a thing. Everybody was his cousin, except two or three
young women whom he was rude enough to call ugly. The Kunitz
princesses had been considered in their turn and set aside, for they too
were cousins; and it seemed as if one of the most splendid thrones in
Europe would either have to go queen-less or be sat upon by somebody
plain, when fate brought the Prince to a great public ceremony in
Kunitz, and he saw Priscilla and fell so violently in love with her that if
she had been fifty times his cousin he would still have married her.
That same evening he signified his intention to the delighted Grand

Duke, who immediately fell to an irrelevant praising of God.
"Bosh," said the Prince, in the nearest equivalent his mother-tongue
provided.
This was very bad. Not, I mean, that the Prince should have said Bosh,
for he was so great that there was not a Grand Duke in Europe to whom
he might not have said it if he wanted to; but that Priscilla should have
been in imminent danger of marriage. Among Fritzing's many
preachings there had been one, often repeated in the strongest possible
language, that of all existing contemptibilities the very most
contemptible was for a woman to marry any one she did not love; and
the peroration, also extremely forcible, had been an announcement that
the prince did not exist who was fit to tie her shoestrings. This Priscilla
took to be an exaggeration, for she had no very great notion of her
shoestrings; but she did agree with the rest. The subject however was
an indifferent one, her father never yet having asked her to marry
anybody; and so long as he did not do so she need not, she thought,
waste time thinking about it. Now the peril was upon her, suddenly,
most unexpectedly, very menacingly. She knew there was no hope
from the moment she saw her father's face quite distorted by delight.
He took her hand and kissed it. To him she was already a queen. As
usual she gave him the impression of behaving exactly as he could have
wished. She certainly said very little, for she had long ago learned the
art of being silent; but her very silences were somehow exquisite, and
the Grand Duke thought her perfect. She gave him to understand almost
without words that it was a great surprise, an immense honour, a huge
compliment, but so sudden that she would be grateful to both himself
and the Prince if nothing more need be said about it for a week or
two--nothing, at least, till formal negotiations had been opened. "I saw
him yesterday for