Her Royal Lover: A Novel — page 18: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

10 HER ROYAL LOVER, exclude a less rigorous etiquette than that of the greatest courts. The salons in which the ball took place were adorned with men in brilliant uniforms and women in gala toilets. Among this multitude, coming and going, those who attracted the most attention were incontestably the affianced ladies who, with the exception of certain princes of the royal family, were remarkable for their beauty, truly rare. The first was the Princess Agusta of Thessaly, and her cousin, Prince George of Pattenpouff. Now the Pattenpouffs, at the close of this good nineteenth century, have the immense chance which the Co- burgs had in the commencement. “They attain to the highest destinies,” some say, “by the intrigue of — their mother ;” others affirm that they owe it to their real qualities. Prince George of Pattenpouff possessed a delicacy, a regularity of features, that in nowise spoiled his tall and slender form. The Princess Agusta had a little of the type of her grandmother, the Empress of Hindustan, type hap- pily attenuated by that of the royal family of Thes- saly, so remarkable for its beauty. But the glory, the radiance of the fete, was as- suredly the Princess Aline of Thessaly, betrothed to the Grand Duke Ivan, brother of the Emperor of Caucasus. Let us stopa moment before this radiant child, _who did not count more than eighteen summers. Have you never in the morning mist, remained in contemplative ecstasy before a rising sun, which on issuing from a rent in the clouds, inundates in dilating, little by little, the landscape with a bril- liancy always increasing, always augmenting, mak- Gom C JOO S i