In the summer of 1880 the Emperor and his Chancellor decided that it was time for their pupil to marry, and they selected for his bride an amiable, robust and comely-faced German princess of the dispossessed Schleswig-Holstein family. I gain no information anywhere as to William’s parents having been more than formally consulted in this matter--and no hint that William himself took any deep personal interest in the transaction. The marriage ceremony came in February of 1881, and William was now installed in a residence of his own--the pretty little Marble Palace at Potsdam. His daily life remained otherwise unaltered. He worked hard at his military and civil tasks, and continued to pose--not at all through mere levity of character, but inspired by a genuine, if misguided, sense of duty--as the darling of all reactionary elements in modern Germany. CHAPTER IV.--THE TIDINGS OF FREDERIC’S DOOM Six years of married and semi-independent life went by, and left Prince William of Prussia but little changed. He worked diligently up through the grades of military training and responsibility, fulfilling all the public duties of his position with exactness, but showing no inclination to create a separate _rôle_ in the State for himself. The young men of the German upper and middle classes, alive with the new spirit of absolutism and lust for conquest with which boyish memories of 1870 imbued their minds, looked toward him and spoke of him as their leader that was to be when their generation should come into its own--but that seemed something an indefinite way ahead. He could afford to wait silently. His summer home at Marmorpalais, charmingly situated on the shore of the Heiligen Sea at Potsdam, did not in any obvious sense become a political centre. The men who came to it were chiefly hard-working officers, and the talk of their scant leisure, over wine and cigars, was of military tasks, hunting experiences, and personal gossip rather than of graver matters. The library, which was William’s workroom in these days, has most of its walls covered with racks arranged to hold maps, presumably for strategic studies and _Kriegspiel_ work. The next most important piece of furniture in the room is a tall cabinet for cigars. The bookcase is much smaller. When winter came Prince William and his family returned to their apartments in the Schloss at Berlin. Nurses clad in the picturesque Wendish dress of the Spreewald bore an increasing prominent part in this annual exodus from Potsdam--for almost every year brought its new male Hohenzollern. Thus the early spring of 1887 found William, now past his twenty-eighth year, a major, commanding a battalion of Foot guards, the father of four handsome, sturdy boys, and two lives removed from the throne.