“Well, you see the Empress of Rhaetia must be a Protestant, and there aren’t many eligible Protestant girls who would be acceptable to the Rhaetians—girls who would be popular with the people. Oh, I have finished about that! You need not look so desperate. Besides, Dal explains that Leopold is a young man who dominates all around him. He wishes to take for his bride a girl who could not by any possibility herself be heiress to a throne. Dal fancies that his desire is to mold his wife, and therefore to take a girl without too many important and importunate relatives; for he is not one who would dream of adding to his greatness by using the wealth or position of a woman. He has all he needs, or wants, of that sort. And then, Dal reminds me, Leopold is very partial to England, who helped Rhaetia passively, in the time of her trouble eight years ago. The fact that you have lived in England and had an English education, would be favorably regarded both by Leopold and his Chancellor. And though I’ve never allowed you to have a photograph taken, since you were a child (I hate seeing young girls’ faces in the newspapers and magazines; even though they are Royal, their features need not be public property!) and you have lived here in such seclusion that you’ve been little seen, still, the rumor has reached Rhaetia that you are—good to look at. Leopold has been heard to say that, whatever else the future Empress of Rhaetia may be, he won’t give his people an ugly woman to reign over them. And so, altogether—”
“And so, altogether, my references being satisfactory, at a pinch I might do for the place,” cut in Virginia, with the hot, impatient rebellion of her youth. “Oh, Mother, you think me mad or a fool, I know; and perhaps I am mad; yet not mad enough not to see that it would be a great thing, a wonderful thing to be asked in marriage by the One Man in my world, if—ah, that great ‘if’—he had only seen and fallen in love with me. It might have happened, you know. As you say, I’m not ugly. And I can be rather pleasant if I choose—so I believe. If he had only come to this land, to see what I was like, as Royal men did in the dear old fairy stories, and then had asked me to be his wife, why, I should have been conceited enough to think it was because he loved me, even more than because of other things. Then I should have been happy—yes, dear, I’ll confess it to you now—almost happy enough to die of the great joy and triumph of it. But now I’m not happy. I will marry Leopold, or I’ll marry no man. But I swear to you, I won’t be married to Leopold in Count von Breitstein’s hateful old, cold, cut-and-dried way.”
“It’s the Emperor’s way as well as von Breitstein’s.”
“Then for once in his big, grand, obstinate life he’ll have to learn that there’s one insignificant girl who won’t play Griselda, even for the sake of being his Empress.”
The girl proclaimed this resolve, rising to her feet, with her head high, and a look in her gray eyes which told the Grand Duchess that it would be hopeless for her to argue down the resolution. At first it was a proud look, and a sad look; but suddenly a beam of light flashed into it, and began to sparkle and twinkle. Virginia smiled, and showed her dimples. Her color came and went. In a moment she was a different girl, and her mother, bewildered, fearful still, dared to hope something from the change.
“How odd you look!” she exclaimed. “You’ve thought of something. You are happy. You have the air of—of having found some plan.”
“It found me, I think,” the girl answered, laughing. “All suddenly—just in a flash. That’s the way it must be with inspirations. This is one—I know it. It’s all in the air—floating round me. But I shall grasp it soon.”
She came close to her mother, still smiling, and knelt down in the grass at her feet, looking up with radiance in her eyes.
Luckily there was no one save the Dresden china lady and the birds and flowers to see how a young Princess threw her mantle of dignity away; for the two did not keep Royal state and a Royal retinue in the quaint old house at Hampton Court; and the big elm which Virginia loved, kindly hid the mother and daughter from intrusive eyes.