Then the Princess passes on, leaving you smiling. I have seen people continue to smile in a lower key for twenty minutes after the Princess has gone by, as water will go on reflecting a glow long after the sunlight has left it. The effect is quite involuntary, and of course it looks a little foolish, but it is agreeable to feel, and nobody, positively nobody, can produce it but the Princess. Indeed the power to produce it would be a capital test for princesses. If I were in any way in a position to submit princesses to tests, I should offer that of the single pea and the twenty feather beds with confidence to ours. Which is a pride and a pleasure to be able to say in these days, when ladies thus entitled are so apt to disguise themselves in strong minds or blunt noses or irritating clothes. It is delightful to be assured that, in spite of this tendency, the Princess has not yet vanished, the Princess of the fairy tales, the real Princess, from among us, that such a one is sitting at the moment in her castle, not ten minutes’ walk from here, eating marmalade with a golden spoon, or whatever she likes better than marmalade, and bringing to life day after day that delight in living which you must have, or there’s no use in being a princess. It is possible that she may not put on her diadem every morning; there is no necessity for that, since you could not imagine her without it; and if she prefers reading her Browning to watching her gold-fish, it is not in any way my affair. Indeed, although she occupies a public position, there is no one who more readily accedes her right to a private life than I, though, of course, with the rest of her subjects, I would prefer that she had as little of it as possible. It is said that the Roy-Regent, knowing what would be expected of her, was not content until he had found the most beautiful and agreeable Princess there was; and I can well believe that he sailed over seas and seas to find her, though it is probably only a tradition that they met at George Washington’s country seat where the Princess was looking for trailing arbutus,--another lovely thing whose habitat is the banks of the Potomac. And an improbable tradition, as George Washington never encouraged princesses.