dozed; dearest Fritzi sometimes even, in the heat of protest or persuasion.  But afterwards, leaving the room as solemnly as she had come in, followed by her wide-awake attendant, she would nod a formally gracious “Good afternoon, Herr Geheimrath,” for all the world as though she had been talking that way the whole time.  The Countess (her lady-in-waiting was the Countess Irmgard von Disthal, an ample slow lady, the unmarried daughter of a noble house, about fifty at this time, and luckily—­or unluckily—­for Priscilla, a great lover of much food and its resultant deep slumbers) would bow in her turn in as stately a manner as her bulk permitted, and with a frigidity so pronounced that in any one less skilled in shades of deportment it would have resembled with a singular completeness a sniff of scorn.  Her frigidity was perfectly justified.  Was she not a hochgeboren, a member of an ancient house, of luminous pedigree as far back as one could possibly see?  And was he not the son of an obscure Westphalian farmer, a person who in his youth had sat barefoot watching pigs?  It is true he had learning, and culture, and a big head with plenty of brains in it, and the Countess Disthal had a small head, hardly any brains, no soul to speak of, and no education.  This, I say, is true; but it is also neither here nor there.  The Countess was the Countess, and Fritzing was a nobody, and the condescension she showed him was far more grand ducal than anything in that way that Priscilla could or ever did produce.

Fritzing, unusually gifted, and enterprising from the first—­which explains the gulf between pig-watching and Hofbibliothekar—­had spent ten years in Paris and twenty in England in various capacities, but always climbing higher in the world of intellect, and had come during this climbing to speak English quite as well as most Englishmen, if in a statelier, Johnsonian manner.  At fifty he began his career in Kunitz, and being a lover of children took over the English education of the three princesses; and now that they had long since learned all they cared to know, and in Priscilla’s case all of grammar at least that he had to teach, he invented a talent for drawing in Priscilla, who could not draw a straight line, much less a curved one, so that she should still be able to come to the library as often as she chose on the pretext of taking a drawing-lesson.  The Grand Duke’s idea about his daughters was that they should know a little of everything and nothing too well; and if Priscilla had said she wanted to study Shakespeare with the librarian he would have angrily forbidden it.  Had she not had ten years for studying Shakespeare?  To go on longer than that would mean that she was eager, and the Grand Duke loathed an eager woman.