Henceforward it was impossible to forget that Albert had worn the white flower of a blameless life.
The result was doubly unfortunate.

Victoria, disappointed and chagrined, bore a grudge against her people for their refusal, in spite of all her efforts, to rate her husband at his true worth.

She did not understand that the picture of an embodied perfection is distasteful to the majority of mankind.

The cause of this is not so much an envy of the perfect being as a suspicion that he must be inhuman; and thus it happened that the public, when it saw displayed for its admiration a figure resembling the sugary hero of a moral story-book rather than a fellow man of flesh and blood, turned away with a shrug, a smile, and a flippant ejaculation.

But in this the public was the loser as well as Victoria.