“You speak it uncommonly well.”
“Oh, I learned it as a child, and then I have relatives in England.”
“Do you suppose there would be any objection to our smoking?” I asked.
“Oh, no! let us smoke by all means.”
I offered him my cigarette case. Our cigarettes afire, we resumed our talk.
“Tell me, what in your opinion is the truth about Mathilde?” I began. “Is she in voluntary hiding, or is her uncle at the bottom of it?”
“Ah, that is too hard a riddle,” he protested. “I know nothing about it, and I have scarcely an opinion. But I may say very frankly that I am not of her partisans. She has no worse enemy than I.”
“What! Really? I’m surprised at that. I thought all the youth of X——— were devoted to her.”
“She’s a harmless enough person in her way, perhaps, and I have nothing positive to charge against her; only I don’t think she’s made of the stuff for a reigning monarch. She’s too giddy, too light-headed; she thinks too little of her dignity. Court ceremonial is infinitely tiresome to her; and the slow, dead life of X——— she fairly hates. Harmless, necessary X——— she has been known to call it. She was never meant to be the captain of this tiny ship of State; and with such a crew! You should see the ministers and courtiers! Dry bones and parchment, puffed up with tedious German eddigette! She was born a Bohemian, an artist, like you or me. I pity her, poor thing—I pity everyone whose destiny it is to inhabit this dreary Principality—but I can’t approve of her. She, too, by-the-by, plays the violin. My own thought is, beware of fiddling monarchs!”
“You hint a Nero.”