This, indeed, became her second nature; yet, at the king’s command, the staid, domestic Mary roused herself from her simple habits and matronly reserve, and was converted into a patroness of mirth and folly; for she was enjoined to use every art to entertain, and charm the fascinating Duke of Monmouth, in order to annoy and endanger her father and his throne. William, jealous to a degree, and concealing under his dry exterior a temper of a furious violence,[130] ordered his exemplary wife to attract and to be attractive, and she obeyed. She received visits in private from the Duke; she danced, she skated, because Monmouth loved those amusements. “It was diverting,” says a contemporary writer, “to behold a princess of Mary’s decency and virtue, with her petticoats tucked half-way to her waist, with iron pattens on her feet, sometimes on one foot, sometimes on the other.” No less extraordinary was it to hear that Mary was permitted to receive the Duke alone every day after dinner, to teach her country dances in her own apartment.[131] So accommodating was this pattern of conjugal obedience, that she could not only lay aside natural feelings, but, what is perhaps more difficult, dispense with long-cherished habits, and reassume the part of girlhood, after a long period of matronly dignity, which somewhat resembled the precision, without the liberty, of a single life. In matters of weightier import than learning country dances, or skating on Dutch canals, Mary was equally subservient. The flight of James from London; the arrival of the Prince of Orange at St. James’s; the subsequent withdrawal of James entirely from the British dominions; the acknowledgment of the convention summoned by William, that the tranquillity of the country was owing to his administration, and the petition of that body that he would continue to exercise regal power,—were events which would have been regarded by an ambitious woman with the utmost intensity of interest.