Her grand-niece smiled.
'By many horses, certainly. Dearest aunt, what would you have? Austrians are all centaurs and amazons. I am only like my Kaiserin in that passion.'
The Princess sighed.
She had never been able to comprehend the forest life, the daring, the intrepidity, the open-air pastimes, and the delight in danger which characterised all the race of Szalras. Daughter of a North German princeling, and with some French blood in her veins also, reared under the formal etiquette of her hereditary court, and at an early age canoness of one of those great semi-religious orders which are only open to the offspring of royal or of most noble lines, her whole life had been one moulded to form and conventional habit, and only her own sweetness and sprightliness of temper had saved her from the narrowness of judgment and the chilliness of formality which such a life begets. The order of which until late years she had been superior was one for magnificence and wealth unsurpassed in Europe; but, semi-secular in its privileges, it had left her much liberty, and never wholly divorced her from the world, which in an innocent way she had always loved and enjoyed. After Count Victor's death she had resigned her office on plea of age and delicacy of health, and had come to take up her residence at Hohenszalras with her dead niece's children. She had done so because she had believed it to be her duty, and her attachment to Wanda and Bela had always been very great; but she had never learned to love the solitude of the Hohe Tauern, or ceased to regard Hohenszalras as a place of martyrdom. After the minute divisions of every hour and observances of every smallest ceremonial that she had been used to at her father's own little court of Lilienslüst, and in her own religious house, where every member of the order was a daughter of some one of the highest families of Germany or of Austria, the life at Hohenszalras, with its outdoor pastimes, its feudal habits, its vast liberties for man and beast, and its long frozen winters, when not a soul could come near it from over the passes, seemed very terrible to her. She could never understand her niece's passionate attachment to it, and she in real truth only breathed entirely at ease in those few weeks of the year which to please her niece she consented to pass away from the Hohe Tauern.
'Surely you will go to Ischl or go to Gödöllö this autumn, since Her Majesty wishes it?' she said now, with an approving glance at the imperial letter.
'Her Majesty is so kind as always to wish it,' answered the Countess Wanda. 'Let us leave time to show what it holds for us. This is scarcely summer. Yesterday was the fifteenth of May.'
'It is horribly cold,' said the Princess, drawing her silver-grey fur about her. 'It is always horribly cold here, even in midsummer. And when it does not snow it rains; you cannot deny that.'
'Come, come! we have seen the sun all day to-day. I hope we shall see it many days, for they have begun planting-out, you see—the garden will soon be gorgeous.'
'When the mist allows it to be seen, it will be, I dare say,' said Princess Ottilie, somewhat pettishly. 'It is tolerable here in the summer, though never agreeable; but the Empress is so right, it is absurd to shut yourself longer up in this gloomy place; you are bound to return to the world. You owe it to your position to be seen in it once more.'
'The world does not want me, my dear aunt; nor do I want the world.'