Irene, raised to believe in a proper Victorian code of behaviour, was easily shocked by what she saw as immorality. In 1884, the same year that her elder sister Victoria married Prince Louis of Battenberg, another sister, Elizabeth, married Grand Duke Sergei Alexandrovich of Russia, and when Elizabeth converted from Lutheranism to Russian Orthodoxy, in 1891, Irene was deeply upset. She wrote to her father that she “cried terribly” over Elizabeth’s decision. Irene transmitted the haemophilia gene to her eldest and youngest sons, Waldemar and Heinrich. Waldemar’s health worried her from early childhood.