“William may have to turn Catholic yet, or Socialist, to keep his throne and get all the other things he wants. Surely religion--the incidental husk of it--cannot mean much to a brain like that.” “He would never let the Jesuits rule him,” said the Archduchess bitterly. “They have been the curse of the Hapsburgs, and their restoration constitutes Metternich’s chief claim to infamy. But their power over rulers in this enlightened age is incredible--perhaps, however, royalty is not so much enslaved by the Church as by its ancestors. Even I, to whom the Catholic Church is but one of many inherited forms, long since rejected by pride and reason--even I am sometimes the victim of that ancient sea of superstition that murmurs in the soul. I can see my father wash the feet of the poor and feel nothing but amusement. I can see him march bareheaded in the Corpus Christi procession, and only fear that he will get a sunstroke--his face was purple last June. But there are times in the cathedral, on great occasions of ceremony, when the mysterious colored dimness, the long sonorousness of priests, the glorified pageant, the divine music, and the intoxicating incense seem to liberate all the ghosts in my soul and send them to my head. Then I have a confused sensation of being in a past century--old doors are opened, old ecstasies, terrors, desires, creep forth. I long to prostrate myself and grovel, to scourge myself into a spiritual delirium, to feel the foot of the Church on my neck. Then creep out the old lusts of cruelty, of tyranny, of torture--what a mere ghost of power a civilized monarch has to-day! Can you imagine that there have been moments in my life when I regretted that?--when, under the spell of Holy Church, I have, for a moment, been a composite of the worst of my ancestors?” “You are always picturesque, and you always make me rejoice that I am an American and not descended in the royal line. But I am astonished that you ever permit your reason, your personality, to be submerged in such a fashion! I should think if there was one woman who could seal up her ancestors and leave them to moulder where they belong, it was yourself. You are not morbid, except in erratic, incidental, ancestral streaks.”