The Princess is married to the Roy-Regent, who puts his initial upon Resolutions and writes every week to the Secretary of State; but it is the Princess who is generally “at home,” and certainly the Princess who matters. The Roy-Regent may induce his Government to make Resolutions; the Princess could persuade it, I am sure, to break them--if she wanted to. Unfortunately we are not permitted to see that comedy, which would be adorable. She does not want to. She is not what you would call a political princess; I have no doubt she has too much else to do. To begin with, only to begin with, she has to go on being beautiful and kind and unruffled; she has to keep the laughter in her eyes and the gentleness in her heart; she has to be witty without being cynical, and initiated without being hard. She has to see through all our little dodges to win her favour and not entirely despise us, and to accept our rather dull and very daily homage without getting sick and tired of us. To say nothing of the Roy-Regent and the babies who have some claims, I suppose, though we are apt to talk about the Princess as if she were here solely to hold her Majesty’s vice-Drawing-rooms and live up to a public ideal. All the virtues, in short, which the rest of us put on of a Sunday, the Princess must wear every day; and that is why it is so difficult and often so tiresome to be a real princess. Fortunately the Simla Princess is not expected to hold her commission for life. Her Majesty knew, I suppose, from her own royal experience, how it got on the nerves, and realized that if she required anything like that it would be impossible to get the right kind of people. So at the end of every four or five years the Roy-Regent goes home to his ordinary place in the Red Book burdened for life with a frontier policy, but never again compelled to drive out in the evenings attended by four cantering Sikhs, each Sikh much larger than himself and shaking a lance. He may go on to greater things, or he may simply return to the family estates; but in any case the Princess can put her crown away in a drawer and do things, if she likes, in the kitchen, which must be a great relief. Of course she can never quite forget that she has been a princess, in commission, once. The thought must have an ennobling effect ever after, and often interpose, as it were, between the word and the blow in domestic differences. For this reason alone, many of us would gladly undertake to find the necessary fortitude for the task; but it is not a thing you can get by merely applying for it.