With the spring things grew brighter; Caroline could not mourn for ever, and thanks to a strong constitution, youth and health asserted themselves, and she quite recovered her beauty and her vivacity. The Ansbach burghers knew all about her refusal of the future Emperor, and they honoured her for her courage and firmness, and were proud of their beautiful young princess, whom the greatest prince in Europe had sued in vain. Caroline interested herself in many schemes of usefulness in her brother’s principality, and went in and out among the people displaying those rare social gifts which stood her in good stead in later years. Perhaps this was the happiest period of her life, and though she was at Ansbach only for a short time, she always retained an affection for the place of her birth, and an interest in the fortunes of her family. Yet she must have felt the contrast between quiet little Ansbach and the brilliant circle at Berlin; her energetic and ambitious temperament was not one which could have long remained content with an equivocal position in a petty German Court, and she must have wondered what the future had in store for her. Caroline was not destined to regret her refusal of the Imperial diadem. “Providence,” as Addison put it later, “kept a reward in store for such exalted virtue;” and her “pious firmness,” as Burnet unctuously called her rejection of the future Emperor, “was not to go unrequited, even in this life”.[11] In June, the fairest month of all the year at little Ansbach, when the trim palace garden was full of roses, and the lime trees in the Hofgarten were in fragrant bloom, the Electoral Prince George Augustus of Hanover came to see and woo the beautiful princess like the Prince Charming in the fairy tale. George Augustus was not exactly a Prince Charming either in appearance or character, but at this time he passed muster. He was a few months younger than Caroline, and though he was short in stature, he was well set up, and had inherited some of his mother’s beauty, especially her large almond-shaped eyes. The court painters depict him as by no means an ill-looking youth, and the court scribes, after the manner of their kind, described him as a prince of the highest qualities, with a grace of bearing and charm of manner. Flatterers as well as detractors unite in declaring him to be possessed of physical courage, as daring and impulsive, and often prompted by his heart. George Augustus had his defects, as we shall see later; they developed as the years went on, but they were not on the surface now, and it was only the surface that the young Princess saw.