LONDON LETTER: Princess Margaret apparently wanted no great fuss at the moment of her death.
In that respect at least she has had her wish granted. For in public terms, certainly, there has been no great outpouring of grief.
Remembering Diana, and the public convulsion which shook the House of Windsor to its roots, police threw up the crowd-control barriers around Buckingham Palace and along the Mall.
But there were no crowds there, or at Kensington Palace, where the somewhat derisory bunches of flowers would be likened to the bedraggled bouquets left on kerb-sides and tied to lamp-posts in tribute to the victims of road accidents.
By Sunday evening, battered by heavy rains, they almost begged to be taken away.
There are explanations, of course. Ill-health had long since removed Princess Margaret from public view.
For some time before that her royal duties had not seemed particularly onerous.
Then, too, the original royal rebel had been eclipsed by the age of Diana - the new, vibrant, fairytale princess, whose beauty and vulnerability touched so many lives and whose shocking sudden death, following divorce and royal exile, threatened so dangerously to divide the nation over the monarchy itself.
On Saturday an older generation reflected sadly on the life and loves of the beautiful Margaret Rose, many of them thinking her wronged by her family and the political and religious establishments of her time, wondering how different it might have been had she been allowed to marry the divorced Group Captain Townsend.
Loyal friends urged against the impression of a sad and unfulfilled life, and they deserve to be heard. This really is the stuff of other people's souls and we can never truly know.
What we do know, however, is that a younger generation does not appear to relate much at all to the private grief of a mother and sister, of two adored and adoring children, and that - while there is sympathy for the queen, and growing concern about the health of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother - Britons last Saturday night were not cast in mourning.
While Prince Charles rushed to be at his grandmother's side at Sandringham, the queen grieved alone in Windsor Castle. Across the country, meanwhile, Her Majesty's subjects were preparing to elect a Pop Idol.
If not quite on the scale of last year's general election, the viewing and voting figures for the ITV's runaway success will have given the politicians pause for thought about where they stand in the age of celebrity. A staggering 15 million people are believed to have watched the show, while 8.7 million votes were cast for the triumphant Will Young and runner-up Gareth Gates.
That combined total exceeded the number of votes cast for the Conservative Party last June. Any rush to celebration in Downing Street, however, will have been checked by the realisation that it fell just two million short of the votes cast for Britain's governing party.
Nor was Pop Idol the only talking point last Saturday. After celebrating his team's success in the fourth round of the Rugby League Challenge Cup, one High Tory devotee of monarchy reflected that neither he nor anyone else had mentioned the death of Princess Margaret in the pub afterwards. "People don't really care about these things," he lamented: "They've no faith in leaders in politics or any other kind either." While clearly possible to over-state, the mood is certainly strange in a country where more people choose to stay at home than trouble to go out and elect a government.
All opinion surveys show respect and admiration for the queen remains strong. Death has already cast its shadow over her Jubilee Year, and fears are now high for the effect on the Queen Mother, predeceased by her youngest child.
Moreover, there appears a deep aversion to the idea of a President Blair or Duncan Smith. Should tragedy strike it still seems certain the nation would look to the Palace rather than Downing Street as the symbol of unity and continuity. Yet the demand for change reflected in the public anguish which greeted the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, appears there too in the very different public response to this royal death.