I am sure that the latter would have felt sorry had she known to what extent the strained relations which existed between her and her son’s wife were talked of in public. She possessed far more sense of dignity than Alexandra Feodorovna, and had moreover been reared in old Imperial traditions unknown to her daughter-in-law. But she did not like her, and on the other hand, this sense of dignity to which I have just alluded suffered in seeing the domestic life of her child, a child who was also her Sovereign, turned into ridicule by everybody, and causing him to be despised even more than disliked. Finding that the war did not allow her to go to her beloved Denmark, she finally retired to Kieff, where the Revolution found her, and whence she went to Livadia in the Crimea, where she still is to-day. When I think over these things, it seems to me that all these frictions, which turned out ultimately to have been far more important than they appeared at first, might have been avoided, at least in part, if the young Empress had restrained herself in the expression of her feelings. But she was too frank, too honest, too true, to be able to play a comedy, and diplomacy was an art utterly unknown to her. She had not been trained in dissimulation, and she despised this atmosphere of the Court where a curb on one’s thoughts and words was indispensable. In certain respects she was a child, with all a child’s impulsiveness and beautiful indifference to the judgments and appreciations of the world, and this innocence of her mind and heart made her no match against the intrigues that surrounded her. She had no one to love her except her children, and a husband who was not strong enough to protect her against attack, and whom in the bottom of her heart she must have secretly despised, as indeed he deserved to be, because, whilst an amiable and kind man, he was not suited for a Sovereign, and could no more control his own conduct than he could the destiny of the nation over which fate had set him to rule. He had absolutely no initiative and no strength of character. No efforts of his parents or of his tutors in his young days had been able to change his natural indolence and readiness to accept and to endorse as his own the ideas and opinions of every one he talked to, even if they differed diametrically from those he had himself expressed previously. CHAPTER XII THE CZARINA’S DAILY OCCUPATIONS