"A sermon," said the Minister of Finance, "which your Excellency thought would shock me, while you really only confirmed my own view. Dear Baron"--here Herr von Schröder laid his hand on his heart,--"I am convinced that there is no longer room for any misunderstanding as to my opinion, my loyal opinion, between you and me. The King can do no wrong.... The sovereign is beyond the reach of reproaches. But here we have to do with a default ... in both senses of the word!... a default which I have no hesitation in laying at the door of Count Trümmerhauff. His predecessors may be pardoned for having concealed from their sovereigns the true state of the Court finances; in those days nothing else was expected of them. But Count Trümmerhauff's attitude now is not pardonable. In his position as Keeper of the Privy Purse he ought to have felt it incumbent on him to put a brake on his Highness's thoughtlessness, to feel it incumbent on him now to open his Royal Highness's eyes relentlessly to the facts ..." Herr Knobelsdorff knitted his brows and laughed. "Really?" said he. "So your Excellency is of the opinion that that is what the Count was appointed for! I can picture to myself the justifiable astonishment of his lordship, if you lay before him your view of the position. No, no ... your Excellency need be under no delusion; that appointment was a quite deliberate expression of his wishes on the part of his Royal Highness, which the Count must be the first to respect. It expressed not only an 'I don't know,' but also an 'I won't know.' A man may be an exclusively decorative personality and yet be acute enough to grasp this.... Besides ... honestly ... we've all of us grasped it. And the only grain of comfort for all of us is this: that there isn't a prince alive to whom it would be more fatal to mention his debts than to his Royal Highness. Our Prince has a something about him which would stop any tactless remarks of that sort before they were spoken ..." "Quite true, quite true," said Herr von Schröder. He sighed and stroked thoughtfully the swansdown trimming of his hat. The two men were sitting, half turned towards each other, on a raised window seat in a roomy niche, past which a narrow stone corridor ran outside, a kind of gallery, through the pointed arches of which peeps of the town could be seen. Herr von Schröder went on: "You answer me, Baron; one would think you were contradicting me, and yet your words show more incredulity and bitterness than my own." Herr von Knobelsdorff said nothing, but made a vague gesture of assent.