Kate Fox was the British nanny for Elena's children. All the Nicholas girls (Olga, Elizabeth & Marina) were devoted to her and Elena trusted her implicitly. However Miechen did not like the friendship and sought to get her fired. Elena resisted this even when her mother stopped her income from Russia. Eventually Kate has to go, but the minute the coast was clear, she became reunited with the Nicholas family. In the book, Elena beamed and wave wildly once she saw Kate Fox in the crowd during a parade. I don't think that makes her a nasty person like Miechen. The thing with her was that she was bought up with a hierarchy of order in what royalty is all about and stuck to it. Indeed, she was correct in the continental sense since the royals today (Hohenzollern, Bourbon-Orleans & Romanov) continued "equal marriages". That was the case even in Britain until WW I, when George V open the way for local female aristocrats to marry into the royal family. Of course that belief in the order of things worked both ways, which explains why Elena sided with the Dowager Empress on the pretensions of her brother Cyril.
