His case is perhaps of all our cases the most provocative of sympathy; even respectable people of the upper middle classes may properly permit themselves to be moved by it. It was no case, this time, of a precociously dissipated youth haunting the stage doors of the theatres given over to musical comedy, and suffering his inexperience to be beguiled by the meretricious attractions of a minx. The daughter of a high-school teacher is—the daughter of a high-school teacher; one need add nothing, for the rest is understood. The description implies culture conjoined with decorum, and set in a frame of homeliness—a high moral tone, and an atmosphere of useful respectability. Whatever one may think of the theatrical ladies whose fascinations have been so fatal to the Habsburg system, one cannot but admire and respect a lady who induces an Archduke to prefer an educational environment to the purposeless frivolities of the gayest Court in Europe. And that was what Fräulein Czuber achieved. For some time Viennese Society had been diverted by the rumours which reached it of Archduke Ferdinand Charles’s homely tastes and habits. He liked, it was said, to mix with the middle classes—not condescendingly, but as if he were one of them; he liked to retire to a middle-class kitchen, and help a homely girl to shell the peas or make the jam; he did not mind being seen looking out of the window of a middle-class flat, with his arm round a homely girl’s waist. So gossip whispered; and presently gossip was reinforced by the solid fact that the Archduke, taking his middle-class friends as seriously as he took himself and the Imperial family, had sworn King Cophetua’s royal oath that the homely girl should be his bride, and had asked her father’s permission, just like any middle-class suitor, to pay his addresses to her. Nothing, surely, could be more admirable; and yet Francis Joseph did not admire. He had not always drawn the line at actresses, though he knew that he ought to have done so. He had been on terms of personal friendship with more than one actress; and it is not unlikely that his particular friend Frau Schratt found occasional opportunities of putting in a good word for the ornaments of an unjustly aspersed profession. But the daughter of a high school teacher—a lady who was not even notorious—in whose favour there was nothing to be said except that she was well bred, well brought up, well educated, modest, domesticated, and respectable—that was another matter altogether. There are men, as we all know, to whom the open scandal of marriage with a woman of the town seems less discreditable than the commonplace ignominy of union to a well-conducted social inferior; and Francis Joseph seems to have analogous habits of thought.