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A Doll's House. Few things ever disturbed this plush-upholstered Eden. To her gratified surprise, May heard the crude colonials cheer her and George when they went to Australia in 1901 to open its first federal Parliament. But when suffragettes later raised their voices, May agreed with her aunt, who remarked: "Could not these females be confined to some Island?" One female killed herself under George's horse as it was running in the Derby. "Poor Jones," wrote May of the jockey, who was shaken up in the incident. Still, it seemed that the Victorian solstice of splendor and security would last forever, and there was always "Uncle Wales" between the royal couple and the awful duties of the throne.
But Uncle Wales (Edward VII) died 'in 1910, and George and May ascended the throne. Through the rigors of the first World War, the death of a son in World War II (the Duke of Kent, killed on a military mission) and the defection (to Mrs. Wallis Simpson) of another, May comported herself with honor, devotion and gravity not unmixed with a shy and pawkish humor. In the nature of its job, royalty is condemned to the kind of madness that belongs to actors who must "believe" in their role before they can go on stage. Queen Mary played many difficult parts without losing her magnificent sanity. Even in World War II, bundled out of London to an estate in Gloucestershire, she kept on the job, collecting firewood and other useful objects for the war effort. Until her death in 1953, a housewife's order was her sensible passion.
Perhaps the most ironical item in Biographer Pope-Hennessy's long catalogue of important trivia in Queen Mary's life concerns the fabulous doll's house completed for her by Architect Sir Edward Lutyens in 1924, at the very time he was also busy building a New Delhi palace for the Viceroy of India, it was thought, but for the President of India, as it turned out. The doll's house was an omen that May's world would eventually shrink to the compass of a toy.