The Archduchess repressed a sneeze: “Fresh,” she replied, “but not too....”
“After sunset, beware dear Aunt, of chills.”
“But for a frog, I believe nothing would have got me out!” the august lady confessed as she fluttered bird-like to her chair.
Forbidden in youth by parents and tutors alike the joys of paddling under pain of chastisement, the Archduchess Elizabeth appeared to find a zest in doing so now. Attended by a chosen lady-in-waiting (as a rule the dowager Marchioness of Lallah Miranda) she liked to slip off to one of the numerous basins or natural grottos in the castle gardens, where she would pass whole hours in wading blissfully about. Whilst paddling, it was her wont to run over those refrains from the vaudevilles and operas (with their many shakes and rippling cadenzi), in favour in her day, interspersed at intervals by such cries as: “Pull up your skirt, Marquise, it’s dragging a little my friend below the knees ...” or, “A shark, a shark!” which was her way of designating anything that had fins, from a carp to a minnow.
“I fear our Archduchess has contracted a slight catarrh,” the Mistress of the Robes, a woman like a sleepy cow, observed, addressing herself to the Duke of Varna upon her left.
“Unless she is more careful, she’ll go paddling once too often,” the Duke replied, contemplating with interest, above the moonlight-coloured daffodils upon the table board, one of the button-nosed belles of Queen Thleeanouhee’s suite. The young creature, referred to cryptically among the subordinates of the Castle, as ‘Tropical Molly,’ was finding fault already it seemed with the food.
“Take it away,” she was protesting in animated tones: “I’d as soon touch a foot-squashed mango!”
“No mayonnaise, miss?” a court-official asked, dropping his face prevailingly to within an inch of her own.
“Take it right away.... And if you should dare sir! to come any closer...!”
The Mistress of the Robes fingered nervously the various Orders of Merit on her sumptuous bosom.