"My dear," said the Queen, "what can you _expect_ from such a set of giggling, empty-headed minxes?" "I know. Still, I feel it a duty to do what I can to improve their minds. I shall bring down my note-book this afternoon. It's got all my notes on those lectures on English Literature I attended last Autumn. I thought I'd read them aloud to them. It would give them a very good general idea of the subject. Enough, at least, to enable them to talk about it without exposing themselves." "I'm sure, Edna dear, it's most sweet of you to trouble about them." "Oh, since I have to live with a Court, I must try and raise it to a more intellectual level." And so that afternoon, while the ladies of the Court were engaged, under the Queen's supervision, in knitting little woollen garments of shattering hues for the unsuspecting Gnomes, the Princess Royal produced her note-book and read aloud extracts which gave an impressionist bird's-eye view of English Literature from the fourteenth to the close of the nineteenth Century. No doubt the lecturer had given his audience credit for some previous acquaintance with the subject, and it may be that Princess Edna's method of note-taking had been a trifle desultory; it was certain that the ladies-in-waiting found a difficulty in assimilating the scraps of literary pemmican she dispensed to them. They received with polite but languid attention such items as that: "Shakespeare stands supreme among dramatists for consummate knowledge of the human heart"; that: "as _Ralph Roister Doister_ is the first pure comedy, so _The Vicar of Wakefield_ may be termed the first idyllic English novel"; that: "while Byron possessed more intellect than imagination, Shelley, on the contrary, was rather imaginative than intellectual"; and even the statement that: "Browning's 'Ring and the Book' contains upwards of twenty-one thousand lines" left them unmoved. It is true they were more interested in hearing that it was: "after he had come under the spell of Petrarch and Boccaccio that Chaucer produced his wondrous Tales," but it appeared their interest was due to some slight misapprehension. Daphne felt the fearful joy of suppressed mirth combined with the danger of detection as she heard Edna explaining with laborious patience that she had _not_ intended to convey that the Poet had been afflicted by a pair of enchanters with any caudal appendages whatever.