explained to me, with sufficient lucidity to enlighten my dulness, the
margravine was tempting him grossly. She saw more than I did of his
plans. She could actually affect to wink at them that she might gain her
point, and have her amusement, and live for the hour, treacherously
beguiling a hoodwinked pair to suppose her partially blind or wholly
complaisant. My father knew her and fenced her.

'Had I yielded,' he said, when my heart was low after the parting,
'I should have shown her my hand. I do not choose to manage the prince
that the margravine may manage me. I pose my pride--immolate my son to
it, Richie? I hope not. No. At Vienna we shall receive an invitation
to Sarkeld for the winter, if we hear nothing of entreaties to turn aside
to Ischl at Munich. She is sure to entreat me to accompany her on her
annual visit to her territory of Rippau, which she detests; and, indeed,
there is not a vine in the length and breadth of it. She thought herself
broad awake, and I have dosed her with an opiate.'

He squeezed my fingers tenderly. I was in want both of consolation and
very delicate handling when we drove out of the little Wurtemberg town:
I had not taken any farewell from Ottilia. Baroness Turckems was already
exercising her functions of dragon. With the terrible forbidding word
'Repose' she had wafted the princess to her chamber in the evening, and
folded her inextricably round and round in the morning. The margravine
huffed, the prince icy, Ottilia invisible, I found myself shooting down
from the heights of a dream among shattered fragments of my cloud-palace
before I well knew that I had left off treading common earth. All my
selfish nature cried out to accuse Ottilia. We drove along a dusty
country road that lay like a glaring shaft of the desert between
vineyards and hills.