Chapter 20 - Page 2

(they gaily avowed it) revelled
in Palace Hotels; and, being unable to afford the luxury of
inhabiting them, they liked, as often as possible, to be invited
to dine there by their friends--"or even to tea, my dear," the
Princess laughingly avowed, "for I'm so awfully fond of buttered
scones; and Anastasius gives me so little to eat in the desert."

The encounter with these ambulant Highnesses had been fatal--
Lansing now perceived it--to Mrs. Hicks's principles. She had
known a great many archaeologists, but never one as agreeable as
the Prince, and above all never one who had left a throne to
camp in the desert and delve in Libyan tombs. And it seemed to
her infinitely pathetic that these two gifted beings, who
grumbled when they had to go to "marry a cousin" at the Palace
of St. James or of Madrid, and hastened back breathlessly to the
far-off point where, metaphorically speaking, pick-axe and spade
had dropped from their royal hands--that these heirs of the ages
should be unable to offer themselves the comforts of up-to-date
hotel life, and should enjoy themselves "like babies" when they
were invited to the other kind of "Palace," to feast on buttered
scones and watch the tango.

She simply could not bear the thought of their privations; and
neither, after a time, could Mr. Hicks, who found the Prince
more democratic than anyone he had ever known at Apex City, and
was immensely interested by the fact that their spectacles came
from the same optician.

But it was, above all, the artistic tendencies of the Prince and
his mother which had conquered the Hickses. There was
fascination in the thought that, among the rabble of vulgar
uneducated royalties who overran Europe from Biarritz to the
Engadine, gambling, tangoing, and sponging on no less vulgar
plebeians, they, the unobtrusive and self-respecting Hickses,
should have had the luck to meet this cultivated pair, who
joined them in gentle ridicule of their own frivolous kinsfolk,
and whose tastes were exactly those of the eccentric, unreliable
and sometimes money-borrowing persons who had hitherto
represented the higher life to the Hickses.

Now at last Mrs. Hicks saw the possibility of being at once
artistic and luxurious, of surrendering herself to the joys of
modern plumbing and yet keeping the talk on the highest level.
"If the poor dear Princess wants to dine at the Nouveau Luxe why
shouldn't we give her that pleasure?" Mrs. Hicks smilingly
enquired; "and as for enjoying her buttered scones like a baby,
as she says, I think it's the sweetest thing about her."

Coral Hicks did not join in this chorus; but she accepted, with
her curious air of impartiality, the change in her parents'
manner of life, and for the