“But you can’t intend to marry King Michael when you care for this other man?”
“Of course I do. It has been arranged for me.”
“What does that signify? It would be wrong.”
“Oh, you English, with your right and wrong! I don’t trouble my head with all that. I take my pleasure as it comes.”
“But you would be miserable, married to a man you didn’t love.”
“Oh, the good Philippa is trying to persuade me to run away with the other! I must tell mamma. She little thinks what a serpent she has welcomed into her home, to poison the innocent mind of her child! But you mistake me, my Lippchen. The misery would be if I married the other. I want jewellery and Paris gowns and a gay Court, not love in a four-roomed flat. One of the Pannonian Archduchesses has tried that. She comes to the Schloss (only to family gatherings, of course) in a common cab, and makes her own dresses, I believe. Can you imagine my doing that sort of thing?”
“I never thought of advising you to run away,” said Philippa indignantly, “and if you are only thinking of what you can get, you had certainly better not try it. But you could remain unmarried. That would be better than——”
“Than marrying the King? Thank you, Lippchen! It’s quite clear that you don’t know the sort of life a Princess leads if she doesn’t happen to marry. No position, no independence, patronised and pushed aside by her relations, obliged to become a dowdy old devotee through sheer terror of scandal, for there is no mercy for any one who is remotely suspected of a tendency to disgrace the house. A convent or a fortress, there’s your choice! No, I shall marry King Michael and keep him in order, at any rate in public, and we will have the gayest Court in Europe. Oh, you may trust me to keep up appearances when I have got the reality.”
Philippa was too much disgusted to answer, and Princess Lida, turning restlessly on her couch, broke into a laugh at the sight of her disapproving face.
“You are too delightfully innocent, Lippchen! But, after all, I am in the right. My mother has brought me up, educated me, trained me, with the sole intention of my making this marriage. You would not have me disappoint her—and myself? Is that how you intend to treat your parents when they present your future husband to you?”