Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Women and Men

[107] Imperial Majesty was a Bourbon. But I must admit, for one, that I had been sitting beside the empress on a sofa for some time, chatting as composedly as I should have done with any other middle-aged lady, before it occurred to me how incongruous was my attitude with the dignity that once hedged her great name. Think of it — a race that had furnished Europe with dukes for five hundred years and with kings for three hundred, that had convulsed nations with wars on questions of dynasty, and had rent courts with strife as to the problem who should use so much as a footstool in the queen's presence-and here was I sitting on a hair-cloth sofa beside a Bourbon! If this was all the reverence still due to a wearer of even that august name, what earthly glory was left for a Guelph? how much less for a Bonaparte! how inconceivably little for poor Queen Kapiolani! I remember, indeed, that one stately American lady, unable quite to forget the traditions of her youth, did actually bend one knee a little before the Bourbon empress; and I wonder whether any one remembered even thus much of homage for her Imperial Majesty from the Hawaiian Islands. Probably not.

As a latter of fact, it is all a play suited for children. The very name and associations of royalty are coming to belong to the childish domain just as distinctly as Puss in Boots or Jack and the