“She’s so extraordinarily uninteresting!”
“Oh Yousef!” his mother faltered: “Do you wish to break my heart?”
“We had always thought you too lacking in initiative,” King William said (tucking a few long hairs back into his nose) “to marry against our wishes.”
“They say she walks too wonderfully,” the Queen courageously pursued.
“What? Well?”
“Yes.”
“Thank God for it.”
“And can handle a horse as few others can!”
Prince Yousef closed his eyes.
He had not forgotten how as an undergraduate in England he had come upon the princess once while out with the hounds. And it was only by a consummate effort that he was able to efface the sinister impression she had made—her lank hair falling beneath a man’s felt-hat, her habit skirt torn to tatters, her full cheeks smeared in blood; the blood, so it seemed, of her “first” fox.