Meanwhile the little Princess blossomed into lovely girlhood, the spoiled darling of her father’s court. She was trained in all the accomplishments suitable to her rank, but the more solid part of her education seems to have been neglected, and with the promise of great beauty she early developed a passion for admiration which lasted all her life. Now that she was a princess her mother was careful to keep her away from all suitors not of equal rank. The early intimacy between the handsome young Königsmarck and Sophie Dorothea was broken off, and Königsmarck was given a hint to leave Celle. He repaired to England to finish his education, and he and the Princess did not meet again for many years, and by that time she was a wife and the mother of two children. Eléonore was justified of her wisdom, for when Sophie Dorothea was scarcely more than twelve years old her aunt, the Countess de Reuss, found in a drawer of the little Princess’s _bonheur du jour_ a love-letter from a court page. The boy was banished for his audacity into lifelong exile, and the governess, whose connivance was responsible, was first imprisoned and then sent away in disgrace. The news of this affair, which was but a childish folly after all, got bruited abroad, and reached the ears of the alert Duchess Sophia. That lady was never tired of tirading against her sister-in-law, the “little clot of dirt” as she invariably calls her in her letters to her niece, and she seized on this incident to point her moral. “Is it not a pity,” she wrote to the Duchess of Orleans, “that Ernest Augustus and myself should have made such a blunder and called to our court that ‘little clot of dirt,’ the more so that we had at hand the Biegle, whom William liked well enough, though she was not so fascinating as his French vixen, who really is a splendid _Stückfleisch_? She would have done very well, and at least have remained in her proper place. Never mind, Sophie Dorothea will avenge us all; she is a little _canaille_, and we shall see.”