However, the Prince did not go to the theatre that night, for after a stately drive through Curtain Wells, from which Jasmine on the grounds of untidiness after a journey excused herself, they sat down to play bridge after dinner. Jasmine did not know how to play bridge. Her uncle told her that her ignorance of the game did not matter, because she could always be dummy, the Prince also being perpetual dummy. Even as a dummy, the Prince wasted a good deal of time, because he had to be allowed to play the cards that were called for, and it took him a long time to distinguish between suits, let alone between court cards and common cards. He had a habit, too, of suddenly throwing all his cards up into the air, so that Snelson was kept in the room to spend much of his time in routing about on the floor for the cards that his royal master had flung down. The Prince had other obstructive habits, like suddenly getting up in order to shake hands with everybody in turn, which, as Mrs. Grant said, expressed his delightful nature, although it rather interfered with the progress of the game.
When the Colonel, with Jasmine as his dummy partner, had beaten his wife and the Prince, he became jovial, and there being still half an hour before the Prince had to compose his excitement prior to going to bed, a game of ludo was suggested. This would have been a better game if Prince Adalbert had not wanted to change the colour of his counters all the time, which made it difficult to know who was winning, and impossible to say who had really won. The Colonel, after humouring him in the first game, grew interested in a big lead he had established with Red in the second game and objected to the Prince's desire to change him into Green. It was in vain that Jasmine and her aunt offered him Yellow or Blue: he was determined to have Red, and when the Colonel declined to surrender his lead, the Prince decided that the game was tiddly-winks, which caused it to break up in confusion.
Prince Adalbert was really too idiotic to be bearable for long. Living in the same house with him was like living on terms of equality with a spoilt monkey. There were times, of course, when his intelligence approximated to human intelligence, one expression of which was a passion for collecting. It began by his going down to the kitchen when the servants were occupied elsewhere and collecting the material and utensils for the preparation of dinner. Not much damage was done on this occasion, except that the unbaked portion of a Yorkshire pudding was concealed in the piano. On another occasion he collected all Jasmine's clothes and hid them under his bed. Aunt Mildred evinced a tendency to blame Jasmine for this, even going so far as to suggest that she had encouraged him to collect her clothes, though in what way this encouragement was deduced except from Jasmine's usual untidiness was not made clear. Snelson was ordered to keep a sharper look out on his master, as it was feared that from collecting inside the house, he might begin to collect outside the house, which, as the Colonel said, would be an intolerable bore. The passion for collecting was soon after this exchanged for a desire to cohabit with owls, the Prince having observed on one of his drives a tame owl in a wicker cage outside a small fruiterer's shop. The owner of the bird was persuaded to part with it at a price, and the Prince drove home in a state of perfect bliss with his pet on the opposite seat.
"It's really lovely to watch him," said Aunt Mildred.
"Never known him so mad about anything as His Serene Highness is now about owls," said Snelson. "He'll sit and talk to that owl by the hour together."
The Prince's devotion to the bird occupied his mind so completely that it was thought prudent to import two more owls in case anything should happen to the particular one upon which he was lavishing such love. The first owl remained his favourite, however, and it really did seem to return his affection, in a negative kind of way, by never actually biting the Prince, although it bit everybody else in the house. Jasmine had no hesitation about encouraging him in this passion, because it kept him so well occupied that bridge, ludo, and tiddly-winks were put on one side, and the Prince himself no longer screamed when he had to go to bed. In fact, he was only too anxious after dinner to get back to his room in order to pass the evening saying, 'Tu-whit, tu-whoo!' to his owls. Unfortunately there was begotten from this association an ambition in the Prince's mind to become an owl himself, and when one evening the Colonel found him with six feathers stuck in his hair, perched on the rail of the bed and trying to eat a mouse he had caught, the owls were banished. The Prince's desire to be an owl was not so easily disposed of. For some time after his pets had disappeared he replied to all questions with 'Tu-whit, tu-whoo!' and once when the Colonel impatiently told him to behave himself like a human being, he rushed at him and bit his finger.
"Who started him off in this ridiculous owl idea?" the Colonel demanded of his wife irritably. "Nice thing if the Baron comes over to find out how he's getting on, and finds that he believes himself to be an owl. You know perfectly well that they don't really approve of his being looked after in England, and I can't understand why Jasmine doesn't make herself more pleasant to him. We all thought before she came that she would be a recreation for him. It seems to me that he's much madder now than he's ever been yet."
"Oh, hush, dear!" Aunt Mildred begged her husband, having vainly tried with signs to fend off the threatened admission of the Prince's state of mind.
But the Colonel's finger was hurting him acutely, and he would not agree to keep up the pretence of the Prince's sanity.
"You can't expect me to go about pretending he's not mad. Why, the people come out of the shops now in order to hear him calling out 'Tu-whit, tu-whoo!' as he drives past. Supposing he starts biting people in the street? I really do think," he added, turning to Jasmine, "that you might put yourself out a little bit to entertain him. Of course, if he bites you, we shall have to do something about it, but I don't think he will bite you."