In speaking of one’s past it is difficult not to take a present point of view; and when I say that being a Royal person in Spain had its serious aspects--because I could not love or marry as a private person--I mean that it had those aspects as I look back upon it. At the time I was not aware of them. They were accepted by me as constituting the natural order of life. Long before I could begin to think of such things as love and marriage I had been schooled to the idea that I could have such relations only with Royal persons. Humanity was divided in my mind into three sexes; there were women, men of Royal birth, and a third sex, who were to me, as you might say, priests. Any affair of love with the latter was unthinkable--not only to me but to them. It never entered my mind, any more than it would with a priest. If it ever entered _their_ minds, I could not know it, because they could not speak to me, even if they wished. In the palace of Madrid, when the usher would take me to the antechamber of my brother’s apartments, I would always have an interval of waiting while word of my visit was being carried to the King. And during that interval there would usually be some young officers or aides-de-camp standing in another part of the room. Since they were Spaniards, and I was not hideous, if I glanced at them I found them trying to look romantic. If one of them was alone, he would either sigh “like a furnace,” as Shakespeare says, or try to look unutterable silences across the room. At first this embarrassed me. But when I grew reassured by the fact that none of them dared approach me or speak to me, I found it comical; and I used to watch them slyly to see whether they were going to be melancholy and sigh, or make lambent calf’s eyes at me in the best Spanish manner. Afterwards I would tell my brother, and he would laugh, because he knew the officers and enjoyed teasing them. It became one of the little jokes between us, that all his young aides were languishing their lives away in hopeless devotion to me. Later, some of them--unwilling, perhaps, to be merely amusing--announced that they were going to blow out their brains. I never heard that any did it; and I did not see what satisfaction it would have been to them if they had. I supposed that they came to the same conclusion themselves. After a while I learned that one does not take such threats of self-destruction seriously in Spain. They are only a form of mild attention paid to ladies by the gallantry that wishes to be dashing.