"There are limits," replied his father. "We must maintain our position."
"That is just where you make the mistake," retorted Max. "You and my dear mother are always ready to play the domestic game where it is not important. You allow photographs of your private life to be on sale in shop-windows; charming private details slip out in newspaper paragraphs; one of you behaves with natural and decent civility to some ordinary poor person, and news of it is immediately flashed to all the press. Two years ago, for instance, when you were triumphantly touring the United States you arrived by some accident at a place called New York; and there, early one morning, having evaded the reporters, you stood looking up at the sky-scrapers when you trod on an errand-boy's toe, or knocked his basket out of his hand; and having done so you touched your hat and apologized--you a King to an errand-boy! And immediately all America, which yawps of equality and of one man being the equal of any other, fell rapturously in love with you! You, I daresay, have forgotten the incident?"
"But America remembers it. When you left, with all the locusts of the press clinging to the wheels of your chariot, they dubbed you 'conqueror of hearts'; and it was mainly because you had knocked over an errand-boy and apologized to him. Now you do these things naturally; but they are all really part of the business: your secretaries report them to the press."
"Why, of course! The errand-boy didn't know you from Adam, and no one but your private secretary was with you at the time; at least, so I gathered: it was before breakfast and you had given the detectives the slip. Well, then, merely by letting your human nature and your sense of decency have free play you help to run the monarchic system--you almost make a success of it. But you stop just where you ought to go on. You are natural--you are yourself--where there is no opposition to your being so. If you would go on being natural where there _is_ opposition--where all sorts of high social and political reasons step in and forbid--you would find yourself far more powerful than the Constitution intended you to be, for you would have the people with you. There is a mountain of sentiment ready to rush to your side if you only had the faith to call it to you. Have you not noticed, whenever a royal engagement is announced, how every paper in the land declares it to be a real genuine love-match? And you know--well, you know. I myself can remember Aunt Sophie crying her eyes out for love of the Bishop of Bogaboo whom she fell in love with at a missionary meeting and wasn't allowed to marry; and six weeks later her engagement to Prince Wolf-im-Schafs-Kleider was announced as a sudden and romantic love-match! Why, he had only been sent for to be looked at when the Bogaboo affair became dangerous; and so Aunt Sophie was coerced into that melancholy mold of a jelly which she has retained ever since.