New York gave a dinner, at which the most insignificant
person present was worth at least a million dollars, and where the
gentlemen who sat by the Princess entertained her for an hour or
two by a calculation of the aggregate capital represented. New
York also gave a ball at which the Princess appeared in an
ill-fitting black silk dress with mock lace and jet ornaments,
among several hundred toilets that proclaimed the refined
republican simplicity of their owners at a cost of various hundred
thousand dollars. After these hospitalities the Grand-ducal pair
came on to Washington, where they became guests of Lord Skye,
or, more properly, Lord Skye became their guest, for he seemed to
consider that he handed the Legation over to them, and he told
Mrs. Lee, with true British bluntness of speech, that they were a
great bore and he wished they had stayed in
Saxe-Baden-Hombourg, or wherever they belonged, but as they
were here, he must be their lackey. Mrs. Lee was amused and a
little astonished at the candour with which he talked about them,
and she was instructed and improved by his dry account of the
Princess, who, it seemed, made herself disagreeable by her airs of
royalty; who had suffered dreadfully from the voyage; and who
detested America and everything American; but who was, not
without some show of reason, jealous of her husband, and endured
endless sufferings, though with a very bad grace, rather than lose
sight of him.
Not only was Lord Skye obliged to turn the Legation into an hotel,
but in the full enthusiasm of his loyalty he felt himself called upon
to give a ball.
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