was subject to the sway of his wife's aunt, and was offended by the
articles which appeared at one moment both in the German and foreign
press intimating that she was the power behind the throne. He is
sufficiently jealous of his dignity to object to be considered as
subject to the influence of anyone, be it man or woman, and one of
the chief causes of the dismissal of old Prince Bismarck was precisely
because so long as he remained in office there was a disposition to
regard the kaiser as a mere puppet in the hands of the old statesman.

It is this aversion to being considered as swayed by any other
influence than his own that has led the emperor on so many occasions
to adopt a course diametrically opposed to that urged upon him by his
clever and masterful mother, a woman with the most powerful intellect
and the least tact to be found in all Old World royalties. It was
this, too, that led the emperor to banish, just a trifle unjustly,
the pretty and dashing Countess Hohenau from his court. She had been
guilty of no indiscretion with regard to him. She had done nothing
wrong, and she was not only a brilliant ornament of the imperial
_entourage_, but likewise a relative of the family. But he banished
both her husband and herself almost at a moment's notice, owing to
the fact that in the anonymous letters circulated at the time of the
so-called Kotze scandal, he was mentioned as altogether infatuated and
subjugated by her beauty.

Count Hohenau is the half-brother of that Prince Albert of Prussia,
who is now Regent of the Grand Duchy of Brunswick. Old Prince Albert
of Prussia, his father, was married to the eccentric and half-crazy
Princess Marianne of the Netherlands. Not long after the birth of
the present Prince Albert, she lost her heart to such an extent to a
chamberlain in her household that her husband was compelled to divorce