"It's so fickle," I quoted. I had to say something, you know.
"And contemptible," added the Queen heartily. "But how is baby?"
I begged permission to send for him. Her Majesty was pleased to play with the little one for a minute or two and that secured me a gracious exit. The Queen attended me to the door, opening it with her own royal hand, thereby rehabilitating me with my entourage waiting outside.
Meanwhile Frederick Augustus had a "critical quarter of an hour" with father-in-law, who assumed to speak on behalf of the King.
"The King," he said, "despised 'playing to the gallery' worse than the devil hated holy water." (This court is overrun with Jesuits, and we must needs adopt their vernacular.)
The King, he repeated, thought it very bad taste for anyone to take the centre of the stage in these "popularity-comedies," and he told a lot more lies of the same character. Then he bethought himself of his own grieved authority.
"Tell your wife," he said, "that I, her father-in-law, and next to the throne, do everything in my power to escape such turbulent scenes, and that I would rather ride about town in an ordinary Droschke (cab) of the second class, preserving my incognito, than in a state carriage and be the object of popular acclamation."
When Frederick Augustus repeated the above with the most solemn face in the world, I thought I would die with laughter and actually had to send for my tire-woman to let my corset out a few notches.
"The old monkey," I cried—"as if he wasn't after 'Hochs' morning, noon and night; as if he thought of anything else when he mounts a carriage or his horse."
"You forget yourself, Louise," warned Frederick Augustus in the voice of an undertaker, and I really think he meant it. But I wasn't in the mood to be silenced.