and persistence of the "hobble skirt." As a consequence of this sudden disturbance of the evolutionary law governing creation in the modiste's sense of the word, there was a sharp reaction a year later, which—after the artificial stimulus of the previous season—threw more women out of employment than ever; new fancy-trades had to be learned in apprenticeships at starvation wages—with the result that wages had to be eked out in other ways. But of all this her Majesty heard nothing. It never occurred to anybody that these ultimate consequences of her amiable incentive to industry could possibly concern her; and the Queen, finding that people no longer knew how to adapt themselves to the long, full skirts of their grandmothers, accepted without demur the next wave of fashion that swept over Europe from London via Paris.

The Queen never herself opened a paper. Extracts were read out to her each day by one of her ladies; these being selected by another lady appointed for the purpose as those most likely to interest the royal mind. It was made known in the press that her Majesty never read the divorce cases; neither did she read politics or the police news. No controversial side of the national life ever entered her brain—until somehow or another it was reached by the dim uproar of the Women Chartists' movement. She expressed her disapproval, and the page was turned.

Her instinctive tastes stood always as a guide for what she should be told; and experience limited her inquiry. In all her life her influence had never been used for the release of an unjustly convicted prisoner, the abatement of an inhuman sentence, or the abolition of any abuse established by law. Queens who had done these things in the past were medieval figures, and such interference was quite unsuitable for a royal consort under modern conditions. Had Philippa of Hainault lived in these more enlightened times she would have been forced to let the Burghers of Calais go hang and restrict herself to making provision for their widows and orphans; for to arrest any act of government had long since ceased to be within the functions of a queen.

Like her husband, this royal lady was surrounded by officialdom, or, rather, by its complementary and feminine appendices—the wives and daughters of the aristocracy, of politicians, of ecclesiastical and military dignitaries: these to her represented the sphere, activity, and capacity of her own sex. Other women—pioneers of education and of reform, rescue-workers, organizers, writers, orators, had—the majority of them—lived and died without once coming in contact with the official leader of Jingalese womanhood; for they and their like were outside the official ranks, and stood for things combative and controversial and dangerously alive, and only a few of them had been brought to Court in their venerable old age, to be looked at as curiosities when their fighting days were over and their work done.

On the governing boards of the hospitals to which the Queen gave her patronage there was not a single woman—or a married one either; but when her Majesty visited the wards she was very nice to the nurses. She was, in fact, very nice to everybody, and everybody was very nice to her.

IV

A king and a queen take so long to describe that the reader will have almost forgotten how we left them at the breakfast table. But the Queen had her letters and the King his newspapers, and there, when we return to them in the historic present, they still are.

Yes, there they sit, an institutional expression of the nation's general complacence with the state of civilization at which it has arrived, interpreting in decorous form the voice of the articulate majority—the inarticulate not being interpreted at all. There they sit, he with his newspapers, she with her letters: the King a little anxious and perturbed, the Queen not anxious or perturbed about anything.

She was still enjoying her superfluous correspondence, he studying in a vague distrustfulness the various organs of public opinion which lay around him, doubtful of them all, yet wishing to find one he could rely on. For now they were all very full of the approaching constitutional crisis, and were adumbrating in respectful, yet slightly menacing terms, what the King himself would do in the matter. Whereas what he actually would do he had not himself the ghost of a notion,—did not yet know, in fact, what legs he had to stand on, having no information upon that point beyond what the Prime Minister had chosen to tell him.

And being puzzled he wanted to talk, yet not directly of the matter which perturbed his mind; but somehow by hearing his own voice he hoped to arrive at the popular sentiment. It was a way he had; and the Queen, who was often his audience, knew the preliminary symptoms by heart. So when presently he began crackling his newspaper and drawing a series of audible half breaths as though about to begin reading, his wife recognized the sign that here was something she must listen to. She put down her letters and attended.

"I see," said his Majesty, culling his information from the opening paragraph of a leading article, "I see that the Government is losing popularity every day. That Act they passed last year for the reinstitution of turnpikes to regulate the speed of motor-traffic is proving unpopular."

"Is it a failure, then?" inquired the Queen.

"On the contrary, it is a success. But the system was expected to pay for its upkeep by the amount of fines it brought in, whereas the result has been to make the conduct of motorists so exemplary that the measure has ceased to pay. Unable to escape detection, 'joy-riding' has become practically non-existent, motor-cars are ceasing to be used for breaches of the peace, and the trade is going down in consequence by leaps and bounds. The fact is you cannot now-a-days put a stop to any grave abuse without seriously damaging some trade-interest. If 'trade' is to decide matters it would be much better not to legislate at all."

"My dear! wouldn't that be revolutionary?" inquired the Queen.

"Keeping things as they are is not revolutionary," replied his Majesty, "though it's a hard enough thing to do now-a-days."

"But," objected his wife, "they must pass something, or else how would they earn their salaries?"

"That's it!" said the King,—"payment of members; another of those unnecessary reforms thrust on us by the example of England."

"Ah, yes!" answered his wife, feeling about for an intelligent ground of agreement, "England is so rich; she can afford it."

"It isn't that at all," retorted his Majesty; "plenty of other countries have had to afford it before now. But it was only when England did it that we took up with the notion. We are always imitating England: the attraction of contraries, I suppose, because we are surrounded by land as they are by water. Why else did they start turning me into a commercial traveler, sending me all over Europe and round the world to visit colonies that no longer really belong to us? Only because they are doing the same thing over in England."

"They saw that you wanted change of air," said the Queen.

"Change of fiddlesticks!" answered the King; "I consider it a most dangerous precedent to let a sovereign be too long out of his own country. It makes people imagine they can do just as well without him!"

The Queen looked at her husband with shrewd and kindly furtiveness. She had a funny little suspicion that the ministry did at times greatly prefer his absence to his presence: and that "change of fiddlesticks" was really their underlying motive. About this monarch she herself had no illusions: he was a dear, but he fussed; and when once he began fussing he required an enormous amount of explanation and persuasion. Even she, therefore, was not at all averse to letting him go on these State outings in which she need not always accompany him. They gave him something fresh to think about, and to her a time of leisure when she need not pretend