The travellers entered Munich at noon. The great generous city lay
tranquil and smiling in the frosty sunlight.
"I have secured apartments," said Miss Vance, "used hitherto by
royalties or American millionaires. My girl must be properly framed
when a prince comes a-wooing."
Lucy smiled. But her usual warm color faded as they drove through the
streets. Jean, however, was gay and eager.
"Ah, the dear splendid town!" she cried. "It always seems to give us a
royal welcome. Nothing is changed! There is the music in the Kellers,
and there go the same Bavarian officers with their swagger and saucy
blue eyes. They are the handsomest men in Europe! And here is the
Munchen-kindl laughing at us, and the same crowds are going to the
Pinakothek! What do you want more? Beer and splendor and fun and art!
What a home it will be for you, Lucy!"
Lucy's cold silence did not check Jean's affectionate zeal. She
anxiously searched among the stately old buildings, which they passed,
for the Wolfburgh palace. "It will not be in these commonplace
Haussmannized streets," she said. "It is in some old corner; it has a
vast, mysterious, feudal air, I fancy. You will hold a little court in
it, and sometimes let a poor American artist from Pond City in to hang
on the edge of the crowd and stare at the haute noblesse."
"Don't be absurd, Jean," said Miss Vance.
"I am quite serious. I think an American girl like Lucy, with her
beauty and her money, will be welcomed by these German nobles as a
white swan among ducks. She ought to take her place and hold it."
Jean's black eyes snapped and the blood flamed up her cheeks. "If I
were she I'd make my money tell! I'd buy poor King Ludwig's residence
at Binderhof, with the cascades and jewelled peacocks and fairy
grottos, for my country seat. The Bavarian nobility are a beggarly
lot. If they knew that Lucy and her millions were coming to town in
this cab, they'd blow their trumpets for joy. 'Wave, Munich, all thy
banners wave!'" Lucy's impatient shrug silenced her, but she was
preoccupied and excited throughout the day. Miss Vance watched her
curiously. Could it be that she had heard of the prince's plan of
marrying her to his cousin, and that she was building these air castles
for herself?
A day or two sufficed to make Miss Vance's cheery apartments the
rendezvous of troops of Americans of all kinds: from the rich lounger,
bored by the sight of pictures, which he did not understand, and courts
which he could not enter, to the half-starved, eager-eyed art students,
who smoked, and drank beer, and chattered in gutturals, hoping to pass
for Germans.
There were plenty of idle young New Yorkers and Bostonians too,
hovering round Lucy and Jean, overweighted by their faultless London
coats and trousers and fluent French. But they deceived nobody; they
all had that nimble brain, and that unconscious swagger of importance
and success which stamps the American in every country. Prince Hugo,
in his old brown suit, came and went quietly among them.
"The genuine article!" Jean declared loudly. "There is something royal
in his hospitality! He lays all Munich at Lucy's feet, as if it were
his own estate, and the museums and palaces were the furniture of his
house. That homely simplicity of his is tremendously fine, if she
could understand it!"
The homely genuineness had its effect even upon Lucy. The carriage
which he brought to drive them to Isar-anen was scaly with age, but the
crest upon it was the noblest in Bavaria; in the cabinet of portraits
of ancient beauties in the royal palace he showed her indifferently two
or three of his aunts and grandmothers, and in the historical picture
of the anointing of the great Charlemagne, one of his ancestors, stout
and good-humored as Hugo himself, supported the emperor.
"The pudgy little man," said Jean one day, "somehow belongs to the old
world of knights and crusaders--Sintram and his companions. He will
make it all real to Lucy when she marries him. He is like Ali Baba,
standing at the shut door of the cave full of jewels and treasures with
the key in his hand."
"Those Arabian Night stories are simply silly," said Lucy severely. "I
am astonished that any woman in this age of the world should read that
kind of trash."
"But the prince's cave?" persisted Jean. "When are we to look into it?
I want to be sure of the treasures inside. When are we to go to his
palace? When will his sisters ask us to dinner?"
Miss Vance looked anxious. "That is a question of great importance,"
she said. "The princesses have invited me through their brother to
call. It is of course etiquette here for the stranger to call first,
but I don't wish to compromise Lucy by making advances."
There was a moment's silence, then Lucy said, blushing and faltering a
little, "It would be better perhaps to call, and not prejudice them, by
any discourtesy, against us. The prince is very kind."
"So! The wind is in that quarter?" Jean said, with a harsh laugh.
She jumped up and went to her own room. She was in a rage at herself.
Why had she not run away to Paris months ago and begun her great
picture of the World's mother, Eve? There was a career for her! And
thinking--perhaps of Eve--she cried hot salt tears.