She had not sent for him, however, and she hardly knew whether she had refrained through the exercise of a will which appeared to sit in a corner smiling with amusement, from pride, a sense of futility, or merely because the argument in her mind had not finished in time. In any case she felt so far from her imperious self that she was almost as alarmed as she was unhappy. She was filled with a dull abhorrence of the idea of living the rest of her life on the surface of her nature, as she was attempting to live it to-night. For what else was left her? Did she become queen, and none knew better than she that it was but a possibility among a thousand opposing forces, she could occupy her brain with routine as her father did; but in a constitutional monarchy, particularly in one as jealous of its rights as Hungary, she would exercise so little power that, with her merciless clarity of vision, she must soon know herself for what she was, an ornamental figure-head. It would be the pride of the Hungarians to have the most beautiful queen in Europe, delight the abundant enthusiasm and the loyal instinct of their natures to love their elected sovereign; and they would value her the more for a charm which must unite all factions and preserve them from internal conflict. They would vote her immense sums to live as a queen should, to restore to the old palace of Buda its ancient glories and excite the envy of Europe. All these things she might have, and she knew them to be toys. Did she sympathize with the tide of liberty rising in the world, and nowhere so vigorously as in Hungary? She had put the question from her again and again, and it had returned as often. Surely he had not revolutionized her brain to that extent; she must be less than herself were she unfaithful to the monarchical idea. And yet, when her mind left Fessenden Abbott it seemed to her that some mysterious force drew it to the great sullen heart of mankind, brooding eternally on its birthright of freedom; every instinct of independence, when not crushed by the tyranny of the Turk or the Russian, still blunted and pruned in a thousand petty and humiliating ways. Would the socialists conquer William? And then--when with greater liberty had come their own adaptation to the unalterable facts of life and human nature--would the world be better, a more habitable place for mankind in the general? And was that the destiny of the human race--the happiness of the many, not the exaltation of the few? That it was a great thought, a grand theory, she did not pretend to deny. But did she sympathize with it?