Any one who makes a royal visit to any country must see it superficially; and if I wrote here that President Cleveland and his beautiful wife were charming hosts, that the country around Washington reminded me of England, that the lake front in Chicago (which was about all of Chicago that I really saw) was handsome, that New York was New York, and the Hudson River the Hudson River--I should not relieve my mind of anything that even Lewis Carroll’s conversational walrus would have cared to hear. And I should not interest even myself by writing it. If I had come to America as a person distinguished by intellect instead of merely by birth, I might have been very proud of the crowds that came to see me; and my contact with American life might have been an illuminating experience worth detailing. As it was, my apparent popularity could mean nothing to me personally; and my experiences, though pleasant, can mean nothing to any one else. Nothing had happened to change my belief that my public life as a royal personage was a busy futility. And when our steamship drew away from the shores of New York, and all the farewells had been said, and the last cheers of the last crowd had sounded, I was at once sad to watch a land recede that I felt I should never see again, and glad to be alone with my own thoughts and free to lay off my public character. I suppose the truth is that I do not easily reflect the “collectif” sentiment. I am not able sincerely to laugh or cry because others are laughing or crying. And I return gladly to solitude, because it is only in solitude that I seem to be myself. As I have said before, this desire for solitude had been growing in me for years. And for years I was held in royal circles by my desire to establish a future for my sons. But my eldest son inherited the fortune of the Duc de Montpensier, and my youngest the fortune of the Duchess; and they became independent of me. The death of the Duc deprived me of one of the few dear friends I had in the world, and broke the last of the few sympathies that had made my life with my husband possible. We had discovered no affection for each other. He had freed himself, in all but name, from the marriage contract. We had never quarrelled; I should say we were never sufficiently interested in each other to quarrel. I decided that we should separate. And in spite of the opposition of Royalty, who would have had me endure anything rather than bring a scandal near the Crown, I forced the separation with the aid of my husband’s relatives, who sympathised with me. I returned to my mother’s home in Paris, the Palais de Castile, and it was one of the happiest mornings of my life when I awakened there, alone, and free. I could get no divorce, because divorce is not possible to any one in Spain--least of all to an Infanta--but I was at liberty to live my life in my own way, and that satisfied me.