I think it was these imitations of the Kaiser that exasperated King Edward more than their original. The Kaiser’s antipathy to King Edward was another matter. As the father of his people, the German Emperor sets an example of personal virtue and austerity such as a parent might set his sons; and King Edward enjoyed his life to the full. The King practised all the diplomacies of silence; the Kaiser always had an impulsiveness in private and public utterance that was the despair of his ministers. The two men were personally antipathetical. They misunderstood each other and underrated each other. But, as I have said before, they did each other a lot of good.
When to-day I think of William II., I always recall a scene which seemed symbolical of the German Sovereign and his people.
A great crowd filled an immense hall of the grey castle which the past has left in the heart of modern Berlin. People of every rank stood shoulder to shoulder, for it was the one day of the year when the Imperial Court sets courage and faithful service before birth and noble ancestry, the day of the _Ordensfest_.
I was quite young and I felt joyous and happy as
I passed up the hall in the Imperial procession, with a page bearing my long _manteau de cour_. And each time that I turned from side to side to bow to the people, I caught a glimpse of the Kaiser at the head of the procession, a silver figure, like Lohengrin, on whose cuirass and helmet the light flashed. Before him walked four heralds in mediæval dress, sounding silver trumpets, and when he reached the dais and stood before the throne, looking down the castle hall, I saw in his steel-blue eyes that look of exaltation which his profound and unshakable belief in the divinity of kings gives him.
Was I a princess born in a democratic age? Or was I living in the age of chivalry, or at the vanished Court of Versailles? Before me, as I went to the dais, stood an Emperor as unshaken in the belief that he possessed godlike qualities as Charlemagne when a Pope set the unexpected crown upon his brow, or, as the _Roi Soleil_, unflattered by worship he believed to be his due. It seemed that I should have been one of those Infantas of Velasquez in a brocade dress and fluttering a little fan.