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Campbell and Grafton were there the next morning when Baron Zeppstein came. As he was voluble, and appreciative of the rare pleasure of an attentive listener, Grafton rapidly ingratiated himself, and soon had him flowing on the subject of “my royal master.”

“His Royal Highness has two passions,” said the Baron, “Americans and his pictures. You Americans are making astonishing—I may say appalling—inroads in Germany; your ideas are getting even into the heads of our women, our girls. I don’t like it; I don’t like it. It’s breeding a race of thinking women. I can’t endure a thinking woman. You can’t imagine what I’m suffering just now through Her Serene Highness; but no matter. Your terrible democratic ideas of disrespect for tradition, for institutions, for restraints, are slipping about even in the palaces of our kings. His Royal Highness—the story goes that he was in love with one of your beautiful countrywomen and that she refused to marry him; she did marry his brother, Duke Wolfgang—morganatically, of course. It would be impossible for one of the house of Traubenheim to marry a commoner in the regular way. Your American invasion hasn’t extended that far—”