"Indeed, your father will do nothing of the sort!" interposed the Queen, while the King was still opening his mouth in wonder at the suggestion.
"If he will only make me an allowance, he needn't," said Charlotte; and while her parents were giving weight to that pronouncement she went on.
"I am going to promise a hundred pounds to every deserving charity you send me to; and if you leave off sending me, I shall write and offer it. It will be in all the papers—it will become the recognized thing—people will begin to look for it,—me and my hundred pounds. And as soon as it is the recognized thing, you know quite well, papa, that you will have to pay."
"Why do you disapprove of vivisection?" inquired her father, finding this frontal attack unmanageable.
"Just a fellow-feeling, I suppose, through being myself a victim. Oh, I don't say there's any torture involved, but now and again mamma gives me an anesthetic, and when I wake up I find something has been done that I don't like—something vital taken off me."
"Nonsense!" said the Queen, "I never do anything of the kind."
But this statement corresponded so startlingly to his Majesty's own experience that he began to pay closer attention.
"When have I done it?" demanded the Queen.
"The last time was when you sent me to spend three weeks with Aunt Sophie in order to develop a taste for foreign missions. It didn't succeed. And when I came back you had changed my suite of rooms without asking me; and I was done out of my balcony!"
"I found her," the Queen explained, "going down by the balcony in the early morning, while the gardeners were still about, to gather flowers."