My great devotion was for my brother, whom I was like. He was never religious in a superstitious way, and he was very lively and athletic and fond of sports, so that we played congenially. He was a clever student, and helped me with my school work. And he was talkative with me, and told me about his life at school, as I chattered to him about mine. But he went away to college in Vienna when I was very young, and then to a military college in England, and I saw him only in his holidays. That, then, was the sort of childhood one had in the Palais de Castile. I saw the comings and goings of politicians and personages from Spain without paying any attention to them and without knowing what they were about; for I spoke French and but little Spanish. With my mother, who spoke almost no French, we talked with difficulty in a mixture of both languages. We scarcely saw her except at dinner in the evening among her foreign guests, or on Sunday when we went to chapel in the Palais; and we children made our own lives among ourselves, apart from the affairs of our elders. I had achieved a certain independence of mind, although no independence of action was possible to me. I had escaped the narrowing influences of our life, but no broadening influences reached me. I had to make my own mental growth without the aid of liberal books or the culture that one gets from informing conversation. I often wonder what would have become of me if another revolution had not returned us to Spain. I was about eleven years of age when it happened. And it came like a bomb. I had not thought of it. I was expecting that, when I finished school, I should have a life like other girls; and I was bewildered when my mother summoned us to her room one morning and told us that my brother Alfonso had been proclaimed King of Spain. I could see from her manner that it was to her a happy event that would make a great difference to us, but I did not realise how it would be. It was as if some one should tell a little girl of a great inheritance that was to make her very wealthy, when she did not understand what money could buy. The first signs of the change came immediately from the nuns at the convent, who treated us more formally than before. And we learned from the girls that they had been told to be different with us, but, of course, they did not succeed. They came to us much excited and curious to know how we felt; and I could see that they were disappointed because we did not feel as delighted as they supposed. Then a great many people began to come to the Palais--Spanish personages, Republicans who had never visited us before, and men who, I learned, had been concerned in my mother’s exile. And it puzzled me to see that she received them all as if they had always been as friendly as they now appeared.