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Rh over the social gaps, and one might hear the tram con ductor turn to the smart passenger on the platform with the question whether he knew that yesterday afternoon the Prince had again spent an hour at Delphinenort.

But what was at once remarkable in itself and at the same time decisive for the future was that throughout there never seemed for one moment to be any feeling of scandal in the air, nor did all the tongue-wagging seem merely the vulgar pleasure in startling events in high quarters. From the very beginning, before any arriere pensee had had time to form, the thousand-voiced discussion of the subject, however animated, was always pitched in a key of approval and agreement. Indeed, the Prince, if it had occurred to him at an earlier stage to adapt his conduct to public opinion, would have realized at once to his delight how entirely popular that conduct was. For when he called Miss Spoelmann a "princess" to his tutor, he had, quite properly, accurately expressed his people's mind—that people which always surrounds the uncommon and visionary with a cloud of poetry.

Yes, to the people the pale, dark, precious, and strangely lovely creature of mixed blood, who had come to us from the Antipodes to live her lonely and unprecedented life amongst us—to the people she was a princess—or Fairy-child from Fableland, a princess in the word's most wonderful meaning. But everything, her own behaviour as much as the attitude of the world towards her, contributed to make her appear a princess in the ordinary sense of the word also. Did she not live with her companion countess in a schloss, as was meet and right? Did she not drive in her gorgeous motor or her four-in-hand to the benevolent institutions, the homes for the blind, for orphans, and for deaconesses, the public kitchens and the milk-kitchens, to teach herself and to stimulate them by her inspection, like a complete princess?