The Princess Priscilla's Fortnight Read Online Free PDF Page A

without speaking, "I'm deteriorating already. For the first time in my life I've wanted to box people's ears."
    "The provocation was great, ma'am," said Fritzing, himself shattered by the spectacle of his Princess being lifted about by a policeman.
    "Do you think--" Priscilla hesitated, and looked at him. Her bicycle immediately hesitated too, and swerving across the road taught her it would have nothing looked at except its handles. "Do you think," she went on, after she had got herself straight again, "that the way I'm going to live now will make me want to do it often?"
    "Heaven forbid, ma'am. You are now going to live a most noble life--the only fitting life for the thoughtful and the earnest. It will be, once you are settled, far more sheltered from contact with that which stirs ignoble impulses than anything your Grand Ducal Highness has hitherto known."
    "If you mean policemen by things that stir ignoble impulses," said Priscilla, "I was sheltered enough from them before. Why, I never spoke to one. Much less"--she shuddered--"much less ever touched one."
    "Ma'am, you do not repent?"
    "Heavens, no," said Priscilla, pressing onward.
    Outside Rühl, about a hundred yards before its houses begin, there is a pond by the wayside. Into this, after waiting a moment peering up and down the dark road to see whether anybody was looking, Fritzing hurled the bicycles. He knew the pond was deep, for he had studied it the day he bought Priscilla's outfit; and the two bicycles one after the other were hurled remorsely into the middle of it, disappearing each in its turn with a tremendous splash and gurgle. Then they walked on quickly towards the railway station, infinitely relieved to be on their own feet again, and between them, all unsuspected, walked the radiant One with the smiling eyes, she who was half-minded to see this game through, giving the players just so many frights as would keep her amused, the fickle, laughing goddess Good Luck.
    They caught the train neatly at Rühl. They only had to wait about the station for ten minutes before it came in. Hardly any one was there, and nobody took the least notice of them. Fritzing, after a careful look round to see if it contained people he knew, put the Princess into a second-class carriage labelled
Frauen
, and then respectfully withdrew to another part of the train. He had decided that second-class was safest. People in that country nearly always travel second-class, especially women,--at all times in such matters more economical than men; and a woman by herself in a first-class carriage would have been an object of surmise and curiosity at every station. Therefore Priscilla was put into the carriage labelled
Frauen
, and found herself for the first time in her life alone with what she had hitherto only heard alluded to vaguely as the public.
    She sat down in a corner with an odd feeling of surprise at being included in the category
Frauen
, and giving a swift timid glance through her veil at the public confronting her was relieved to find it consisted only of a comfortable mother and her child.
    I know not why the adjective comfortable should so invariably be descriptive of mothers in Germany. In England and France though you may be a mother, you yet, I believe, may be so without being comfortable. In Germany, somehow, you can't. Perhaps it is the climate; perhaps it is the food; perhaps it is simply want of soul, or that your soul does not burn with a fire sufficiently consuming. Anyhow it is so. This mother had all the good-nature that goes with amplitude. Being engaged in feeding her child with
belegte Brödchen
--that immensely satisfying form of sandwich--she at once offered Priscilla one.
    "No thank you," said Priscilla, shrinking into her corner.
    "Do take one, Fräulein," said the mother, persuasively.
    "No thank you," said Priscilla, shrinking.
    "On a journey it passes the time. Even if one is not hungry, thank God one can always eat. Do take one."
    "No thank you," said