Of course incidents of the kind could not be productive of good relations. It did not take a long while before the general public, which, at that time, looked very much for its inspirations toward the Imperial Family, had come to the conclusion that the young Empress was a capricious, rude, and most disagreeable kind of person to whom it was preferable to give a wide berth. Once this legend had been transferred into the domain of history, every action, every word, every gesture of Alexandra Feodorowna was watched with attentive and critical eyes, always ready to make capital out of all her mistakes and to amplify all her errors into crimes. The fact of her having no son added to the resentful feelings of the nation against her, and that of her undisguised German sympathies did not contribute to make her popular. She in her turn, angry with her family, furious with St. Petersburg society, unable to seek friends among the Russian people, all of whom seemed in her inexperienced and prejudiced eyes to be more or less savage, set herself a task to show her contempt and dislike to those persons whom she had found so ready to throw stones against her on occasions when her conscience had told her that she did not deserve the insult. She retired more and more into the seclusion and privacy of her home at Tsarskoye Selo, and she announced to whoever wished to hear her that she did not see why she should spend her money in giving balls and entertaining a society that seemed to have made up its mind to insult her on every possible occasion. The words were repeated, and immediately taken up by the public in the light of another affront. One declared that for a penniless Hessian Princess to talk about “her money” was, to say the least, ridiculous, and one added that she ought to remember that it was part of the duties of a Russian Empress to entertain her subjects and to give them some pleasures in return for their fidelity. Such was the position after Alexandra Feodorowna had been married three or four years. She might still at that time, had she attempted it in earnest, won back at least the respect if not the sympathies of the Russian nation. But to do so she would have had to bend down from the height of the Throne upon which she was seated, and to make some efforts to clear the misunderstandings which had arisen between her, her family, and her subjects. Unfortunately for her, the haughty Princess believed so firmly that she had been sinned against without having the least sin to her own credit that this “injustice,” as she called it, in the world’s judgments of her personality made her rebellious, and, not being clever enough either to forgive or to disdain it, she could find nothing else to do but to seek to revenge herself upon imaginary wrongs by making herself guilty of real ones. VIII SORROW AND UNEXPECTED CONSOLATION