Somewhere about ten o’clock the Empress would rise and depart, followed by the ladies, who all turned and made a curtsy to the Emperor as they went past, he regarding them with a rather mocking, quizzical gaze. When the Emperor was away, the ladies often dined upstairs in the apartment of the Empress, and sat afterwards in her private salon, one of the loveliest rooms in the Palace, all pale yellow satin and silver mouldings.
Until his marriage the Crown Prince was a very frequent visitor at the New Palace, usually staying there at Christmas and other times of festivity. He is the only one of the princes enjoying the title of Imperial Highness, his brothers and sister being only Royal Highnesses.
At the time of the death of the Emperor Frederick and his father’s accession to the throne as William II. the young prince was only seven years old.
So that no invidious distinction could be made between himself and his brothers, the title of Crown Prince was not used until he was eighteen years of age, and the little boy was so unconscious of his right to the title that when he heard that one of the officers had been promoted, and was asked to guess what he had now become, he said with a delighted smile, “Perhaps he’s been made Crown Prince.”
He is, as every one knows, a young man who has devoted much time to sport, and, like his father, has many spheres of activity, having written a book, visited India, and made some good and a few unwise speeches. He is an ardent soldier and a typical Hohenzollern, with supreme confidence in the star of his family, and earnestly desires to live his life in his own way, to move with the times, to be a child of his century; and it is probable that with a little more experience of life, especially perhaps of that discipline of sorrow which initiates most men into a new sphere of thought, he will develop into the man the world hopes to see in him—something steadfast and strong, and perhaps a little more silent. At present he is very good-natured, very kind, very crude in his ideas, very young for his age, very self-confident and rather selfish, as the modern type of young man is apt to be. He is popular in Potsdam, where he picks up little boys for rides on his charger as he comes home from drill, flings gold pieces abroad to poverty-stricken people, gives lifts in his motor-car to weary men on the road. He has all that facile, democratic, easy generosity which wins popularity, and possesses great charm of manner together with a hatred of coercion and restraint. Probably some recent outbreaks have been due to a desire to show his independence of mind, a yearning to cast off conventional shackles and to say what he thinks.
He still has a good deal of the schoolboy in his composition, although since his marriage he has given up his favourite pastime of sliding down staircase banisters.
But it is not so long since, when he and his family were living in the Stadt-Schloss at Potsdam, one wet day when entertainment was hard to find, he had the happy idea of amusing his children by taking their tiny Shetland pony upstairs to the nursery.
The pony had first to be fetched by the Crown Prince and his adjutant from the stables of the Marmor Palais, and was with difficulty dragged and pushed into the automobile, where, in a state of abject terror, it protested all the way against its abduction.
When they arrived at the Stadt-Schloss the pony was led or rather hauled bodily up the stairs, and was so unnerved by its experiences that its behaviour on arriving in the nursery scared the little princes into tears, and they begged for the pony to be taken away again, howling without intermission until the poor animal was, with difficulty, removed.