Having answered his inquiry the Queen relapsed into her correspondence, while the King resumed his newspaper; and the moment may be regarded as propitious for presenting the reader with a portrait of these two august personages, since so good an opportunity may not occur again. The kind of portrait we offer is, of course, of an up-to-date and biographical character, and does not limit itself to those circumstances of time and space in which the commencement of this history has landed us.
So, first, we take the King,--not as we have just found him, seated at a table with chair turned sideways and features sharply illuminated by the reflected lights of the journal he holds in his hands--for thus we do not see him to advantage, and it is to advantage that we would exhibit in its externals a character of which, before we have done with it, we intend to grow fond. Time and space must provide us with a broader view of him than that.
This King had been upon the throne for twenty-five years; and during that period, like a rich wine in the wood, monarchy had mellowed within him, permeating his system with its mild and slightly dry flavor; it had become as it were a habit, and he carried it quite naturally, almost unconsciously, though with just a suspicion of weight, much as a scholar carries his learning or a workman his bag of tools.
A pleasantly florid face, quaintly expressive of an importance about which its owner was undecided, imposed above a fullish waistcoat a chin which was now tending toward the slopes of middle age. The eyes were mild and vaguely speculative, the lips full and loosely formed, and when they smiled they began tentatively in a tremulous lift showing only the two upper front teeth--the smile of a woman rather than of a man. This smile--when it made, as it so often had to make, its appearance in public--was curiously suggestive of interrogation. "Am I now meant to smile?" it seemed to say. "Very good, then I will." This tentatively advanced smile of a countenance so highly exalted for others to gaze on, was peculiarly winning to those who were its recipients; it suggested a gentle character, indicating through its shyness both the giving and the receiving of a favor; and among those in personal attendance on him the King was--perhaps on account of that smile--more liked than he knew. Servants whom the vastness of his establishments did not convert into total strangers found him a considerate master, full of a personal interest in their snug lives, and with a carefully practised memory for the numbers and names of their children; and the only complaint that even his valets had against him was that he remained his own barber and evinced a certain reluctance in casting his suits until they had begun to show a suspicion of wear. In outward relations he was a kind, touchy, companionable soul; inwardly he was one who suffered acutely from lack of companionship and conversation, not because he had not plenty of people to talk to, but because so many things came into his head that he must not say, while the correct substitutes for them only occurred to him later. And thus it came about that a good deal of his intercourse with humanity was limited to a pleasant expression of face, wearing generally, especially when it smiled, a wistful note of interrogation.