She, too, from her youth had watched the game
with an interest which had not waned in her maturity, and which,
in her days of sitting by the fire, had increased with every move
the hovering hands made. She had been familiar with political
parties and their leaders, she had met heroes and statesmen; she
had seen an unimportant prince become an emperor, who, from his
green and boastful youth, aspired to rule the world and whose
theatrical obsession had been the sly jest of unwary nations, too
carelessly sure of the advance of civilization and too indifferently
self-indulgent to realize that a monomaniac, even if treated as a
source of humour, is a perilous thing to leave unwatched. She had
known France in all the glitter of its showy Empire, and had seen
its imperial glories dispersed as mist. Russia she had watched with
curiosity and dread. On the day when the ruler, who had bestowed
freedom on millions of his people, met his reward in the shattering
bomb which tore him to fragments, she had been in St. Petersburg. A
king, who had been assassinated, she had known well and had well
liked; an empress, whom a frenzied madman had stabbed to the heart,
had been her friend.
Her years had been richly full of varied events, giving a strong
and far-seeing mind reason for much unspoken thought of the kind
which leaps in advance of its day's experience and exact knowledge.
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