Later times: the King's brain ceased to visualize, he came back to himself and to the accumulated problems now pressing for solution. Yes; for the monarchy, not only as she had made it, but as it had now become, that great little lady was almost equally responsible. Her genius had only arrested its decay by bottling it up in the clear preservative of her own virtues. It now stood out more conspicuously than ever, a survival from the past: it had not really moved on. Had it, under that preserving process, become more brittle? With a more open mind he was beginning to suspect that the ancient institution was crumbling in his hands; that a creeping paralysis had seized hold of it. Why? What had he done? Was simple honesty the last and fatal touch that had called these symptoms of death to light? Had he been too human for an office with which humanity was no longer compatible? It seemed a confounding charge to one whose soul was filled with a social hunger which ever went unsatisfied, whose official isolation from his people was a daily obsession. His doubt was whether he had been human enough? As he cogitated on the matter the suspicion grew in him that he had only been human domestically; outside his domesticity he had resigned his humanity and become an automaton, a thing in leading-strings. He had allowed constitutional usage, aye, and constitutional encroachments also, to crush him down. In constitutional usage he was as harnessed and bedizened as the piebald ponies who drew his state-coach when he went each year to open or shut the flood-gates of legislative eloquence. Constitutional usage, determined for him by others, was the bearing-rein that had bowed his neck to that decorative arch of mingled condescension and pride with which he received deputations, addresses, ambassadors. Constitutional usage had put a bit in his mouth and blinkers upon his eyes, so that now, even in his own Council Chamber, he was not expected to speak, was not expected to see unless his attention were specially invited. More and more the critical and suspensory powers of the Crown were coming to be regarded as out of place, a straining of the Royal Prerogative. The growth of the ministerial system had gone on; and he, shut off from growth in its midst, was being robbed of strength day by day. And all this was being done, not in the eyes of his people, but secretly, under smooth and respectful formalities, by a Cabinet insidiously bent on acquiring as its own that of which it robbed him. In this unwritten and unnoticed readjustment of the Constitution nothing was being passed on to the people's representatives. They knew nothing about it; keeping all that to itself, the Cabinet, like the grim wolf with privy paw, "daily devoured apace, and nothing said."