'Most certainly!' said the Princess, with a little, a very little, asperity. 'The world was much happier when distinctions and divisions were impassable. There are no sumptuary laws now. What is the consequence? That, your bourgeoise ruins her husband in wearing gowns fit only for a duchess, and your prince imagines it makes him popular to look precisely like a cabman or a bailiff.'
'And even in the matter of utility,' said Sabran, who always agreed with her, 'those sumptuary laws had much in their favour. If one look through the chronicles and miniatures, say of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, how much more sensible for the change of seasons and the ease of work seems the costume of the working people? The cotte hardie was a thousand times more comfortable and more becoming than anything we have. If we could dress once more as all did under Louis Treize gentle and simple would alike benefit.'
'What a charmingly intelligent person he is!' thought the Princess, as she remarked that in Austria they were happier than the rest of the world: there were peasant costumes still there.
Wanda left them a little later to confer with one of her land stewards. Sabran remained seated by the Princess, in whom he felt that he possessed a friend.
'What did you think of those schools? said Frau Ottilie. 'Oh, of course you admire and approve; you must admire and approve when they are the hobby of a beautiful woman, who is also your hostess.'
'Does that mean, Princess, that you do not?'
'No doubt the schools are excellent,' replied the Princess, in a tone which condemned them as ridiculous. 'But for my own part I prefer those things left to the Church, of which they constitute alike the privilege and the province. I cannot see either why a peasant child requires to know how a tree grows; that a merciful Providence placed it there is all he can need to be told, and that he should be able to cut it down without cutting off his own fingers is all the science that can possibly be necessary to him. However, Wanda thinks otherwise, and she is mistress here.'
'But the schools surely are eminently practical ones?'
'Practical! Is it practical to weave a romance as long as "Pamela" about the changes of a chrysalis? I fail to see it. That a grub is a destructive creature is all that any one needs to know; there is nothing practical in making it the heroine of an interminable metempsychosis. But all those ideas of 'Wanda's have a taint of that modern poison which her mind, though it is so strong iii many things, has not been strong enough to resist. She does not believe in the efficacy of our holy relics (such as that which I sent you, and which wrought your cure), but she does believe in the fables that naturalists invent about weeds and beetles, and she finds a Kosmos in a puddle!'
'You are very severe, Princess.'