To the state of the Princess belongs that quaint old-fashioned demonstration, the curtsey. The Princess curtseys to the Queen-Empress--how I should like to see her do it!--and we all curtsey to the Princess. This alone would make Simla a school for manners, now that you have to travel so far, unless you are by way of running in and out of Windsor Castle, to find the charming form in ordinary use. How admirable a point of personal contact lies in the curtsey--what deference rendered, what dignity due! “You are a Princess,” it says, “therefore I bend my knee. I am a Person, therefore I straighten it again,” and many things more graceful, more agreeable, more impertinent than that. Indeed, there is a very little that cannot be said in the lines and the sweep of a curtsey. To think there was a time when conversation was an art, and curtseying an accomplishment, is to hate our day of monosyllables and short cuts, of sentiments condensed, and opinions taken for granted. One wonders how we came to lose the curtsey, and how much more went with it, how we could ever let it go, to stand instead squarely on our two feet and nod our uncompromising heads, and say what we have to say. I suppose it is one of the things that are quite gone; we can never reaffect it, indeed our behaviour, considered _as_ behaviour, is growing steadily worse. Already you may be asked, by a person whom you have never seen before, whether you prefer Ecclesiastics or Omar Khayyám, or how you would define the ego, or what you think of Mr. Le Gallienne--matters which require confidence, almost a curtain. We have lost the art of the gradual approach; presently we shall hustle each other like kinetic atoms. A kinetic atom, I understand, goes straight to the point. We all love curtseying to the Princess therefore, partly because it is a lost art, and partly because it is a way in which we can say, without being fulsome or troublesome, how happy we are to see her. There is only one circumstance under which it is not entirely a privilege. That is when, dismounted, one meets her in one’s habit. Whether it is the long boots or the short skirt, or the uncompromising cut, I cannot say, but I always feel, performing a curtsey to the Princess in my habit, that I am in a false position. Every true woman loves to stalk about in her habit, and tap her heels with her riding crop; there is a shadow of the privileges of the other sex about it which is alluring, and which, as the costume is sanctioned, one can enjoy comfortably; but it is not arranged for curtseying, and there ought to be a dispensation permitting ladies wearing it to bow from the waist.