Well, if princes must be princes in these matters, Joseph had got, let it be admitted, the best that he deserved. I think so myself. I feel a little impatient, I must confess, of that enamoured philosopher, who, having sent as it were a professional appraiser to value his fancy, could behave to her, when acquired, as if she were the prize of his most single and determined devotion. But he was really devoted to her--even passionately so; and if she repaid him with duty rather than affection, he was not the man or the philosopher to complain. He knew well enough that there must always be something lacking in unions of policy, which nothing but a miracle of chance could make soul-unions; and Joseph could not be unjust or unreasonable--save, perhaps, when he regarded the quality of his own reason and found it pre-eminent. So he was satisfied to remain the positive pole of love to his wife’s negative. For the rest, the young archduchess did all, or almost all, that was expected of her. She was a dutiful wife, a gentle mistress, a timely mother; and if the one babe she bore to her husband was of her own sex, not her disinclination to oblige, but nature, was responsible for the reservation. Infanticide, by unsophisticated girls, is often due to terror and repulsion over the totally unforeseen. On a higher plane we find the fruit of lovelessness regarded by its bearer with cold alien eyes. That is far too harsh a description of Isabella’s attitude towards her little infant; yet the thing seemed oddly strange to her, something queerly remote from her own knowledge and volition--a changeling, as it were, that had been deposited by her while she slept. It attracted her; she was curious about it; but in a detached way. It gratified her most in its relation to the task she had set herself, and which was now accomplished. She had given a potential heir to the throne; she had made _him_ happy. Surely, now, she might look with confident eyes to her release. This poor physical residue of her had played out its part. It had, in truth; and so we approach the end. There is no need to linger over it, now the little ground is cleared, and the other actors in the drama are put away like inessential shadows into the background. It is the passion of the moonlit garden once more--the rapture and the meeting.