"As Uncle Majesty commands," lisped the young girl, very much embarrassed.
"I promised Louise a sleigh ride. Perhaps she would like to go with her," suggested the Empress.
"All right. Two horses and outrider."
An outrider—something, to be sure, but going to the park "with that kid."
Princess Victoria Louise was eleven then, and intellectually no more advanced than a child of four. Poor child! her father's ear trouble seemed only one of the dreadful inheritances that stamped her a sufferer from Hohenzollern disease. And Bertha had fondly imagined that she was to be classed with grown-ups!
"Did Fraulein enjoy her lunch?" asked the motherly Frau Martha, when summoned to help her young mistress change for the outing.
"Plenty to eat, but no chance to eat it," replied the Krupp heiress sullenly. "Get me a sandwich or two, or I shall faint."
"We were told," wailed Frau Martha, "that lunch was dinner for servants, and this was the menu: half-bottle of small beer each, yellow peas in the husks, three inches of terribly salt boiled beef, three potatoes each, two carrots, and no bread."
The Krupp servants, it seems, were no better treated than those of the Prince of Wales (afterwards King Edward) and the untitled attendants of other royal highnesses and majesties, those of the King and Queen of Italy, for instance.
In the 'nineties it was common report in Berlin diplomatic circles that the Prince of Wales kept away from Berlin because he "could not induce any of his favourite servants to be of the party," these favourite servants being the same whom the then Court Marshal, von Liebenau—a drill sergeant with a gold stick—designated "as the hungriest and most impudent set of menials" he ever had the misfortune to encounter in the exercise of his duties.