1905
"Oft habe ich die Welt durchwandert, und habe immer
gesehen, wie das Grosse am Kleinlichen scheitert, und das
Edle von dem ätzenden Gift des Alltäglichen zerfressen wird."
FRITZING, "Erlebtes und Erlittenes."
I
Her Grand Ducal Highness the Princess Priscilla of Lothen-Kunitz was
up to the age of twenty-one a most promising young lady. She was not
only poetic in appearance beyond the habit of princesses but she was
also of graceful and appropriate behaviour. She did what she was told;
or, more valuable, she did what was expected of her without being
told. Her father, in his youth and middle age a fiery man, now an
irritable old gentleman who liked good food and insisted on strictest
etiquette, was proud of her on those occasions when she happened to
cross his mind. Her mother, by birth an English princess of an
originality uncomfortable and unexpected in a royal lady that
continued to the end of her life to crop up at disconcerting moments,
died when Priscilla was sixteen. Her sisters, one older and one
younger than herself, were both far less pleasing to look upon than
she was, and much more difficult to manage; yet each married a
suitable prince and each became a credit to her House, while as for
Priscilla,--well, as for Priscilla, I propose to describe her dreadful
conduct.
But first her appearance. She was well above the average height of
woman; a desirable thing in a princess, who, before everything, must
impress the public with her dignity. She had a long pointed chin, and
a sweet mouth with full lips that looked most kind. Her nose was not
quite straight, one side of it being the least bit different from the
other,--a slight crookedness that gave her face a charm absolutely
beyond the reach of those whose features are what is known as
chiselled. Her skin was of that fairness that freckles readily in hot
summers or on winter days when the sun shines brightly on the snow, a
delicate soft skin that is seen sometimes with golden eyelashes and
eyebrows, and hair that is more red than gold. Priscilla had these
eyelashes and eyebrows and this hair, and she had besides beautiful
grey-blue eyes--calm pools of thought, the court poet called them,
when her having a birthday compelled him to official raptures; and
because everybody felt sure they were not really anything of the kind
the poet's utterance was received with acclamations. Indeed, a
princess who should possess such pools would be most undesirable--in
Lothen-Kunitz nothing short of a calamity; for had they not had one
already? It was what had been the matter with the deceased Grand
Duchess; she would think, and no one could stop her, and her life in
consequence was a burden to herself and to everybody else at her
court. Priscilla, however, was very silent. She had never expressed an
opinion, and the inference was that she had no opinion to express. She
had not criticized, she had not argued, she had been tractable,
obedient, meek. Yet her sisters, who had often criticized and argued,
and who had rarely been obedient and never meek, became as I have said
the wives of appropriate princes, while Priscilla,--well, he who runs
may read what it was that Priscilla became.
But first as to where she lived. The Grand Duchy of Lothen-Kunitz lies
in the south of Europe; that smiling region of fruitful plains,
forest-clothed hills, and broad rivers. It is one of the first places
Spring stops at on her way up from Italy; and Autumn, coming down from
the north sunburnt, fruit-laden, and blest, goes slowly when she
reaches it, lingering there with her serenity and ripeness, her calm
skies and her windless days long after the Saxons and Prussians have
lit their stoves and got out their furs. There figs can be eaten off
the trees in one's garden, and vineyards glow on the hillsides. There
the people are Catholics, and the Protestant pastor casts no shadow of
a black gown across life. There as you walk along the white roads, you
pass the image of the dead Christ by the wayside; mute reminder to
those who would otherwise forget of the beauty of pitifulness and
love. And there, so near is Kunitz to the soul of things, you may any
morning get into the train after breakfast and in the afternoon find
yourself drinking coffee in the cool colonnades of the Piazza San
Marco at Venice.
Kunitz is the capital of the duchy, and the palace is built on a hill.
It is one of those piled-up buildings of many windows and turrets and
battlements on which the tourist gazes from below as at the
realization of a childhood's dream. A branch of the river Loth winds
round the base of the hill, separating the ducal family from the
red-roofed town along its other bank. Kunitz stretches right round the
hill, lying clasped about its castle like a necklet of ancient stones.
At the foot of the castle walls the ducal orchards and kitchen gardens
begin, continuing down to the water's edge and clothing the base of
the hill in a garment of blossom and fruit. No fairer sight is to be
seen than the glimpse of these grey walls and turrets rising out of a
cloud of blossom to be had by him who shall stand in the market place
of Kunitz and look eastward up the narrow street on a May morning; and
if he who gazes is a dreamer he could easily imagine that where the
setting of life is so lovely its days must of necessity be each like a
jewel, of perfect brightness and beauty.
The Princess Priscilla, however, knew better. To her unfortunately the
life within the walls seemed of a quite blatant vulgarity; pervaded by
lacqueys, by officials of every kind and degree, by too much food, too
many clothes, by waste, by a feverish frittering away of time, by a
hideous want of privacy, by a dreariness unutterable. To her it was a
perpetual behaving according to the ideas officials had formed as to
the conduct to be expected of princesses, a perpetual pretending not
to see that the service offered was sheerest lip-service, a perpetual
shutting of the eyes to hypocrisy and grasping selfishness. Conceive,
you tourist full of illusions standing free down there in the market
place, the frightfulness of never being alone a moment from the time
you get out of bed to the time you get into it again. Conceive the
deadly patience needed to stand passive and be talked to, amused,
taken care of, all day long for years. Conceive the intolerableness,
if you are at all sensitive, of being watched by eyes so sharp and
prying, so eager to note the least change of expression and to use the
conclusions drawn for personal ends that nothing, absolutely nothing,
escapes them. Priscilla's sisters took all these things as a matter of
course, did not care in the least how keenly they were watched and
talked over, never wanted to be alone, liked being fussed over by
their ladies-in-waiting. They, happy girls, had thick skins. But
Priscilla was a dreamer of dreams, a poet who never wrote poems, but
whose soul though inarticulate was none the less saturated with the
desires and loves from which poems are born. She, like her sisters,
had actually known no other states; but then she dreamed of them
continuously, she desired them continuously, she read of them
continuously; and though there was only one person who knew she did
these things I suppose one person is enough in the way of
encouragement if your mind is bent on rebellion. This old person,
cause of all the mischief that followed, for without his help
I do not see what Priscilla could have done, was the ducal
librarian--_Hofbibliothekar_, head, and practically master of the
wonderful collection of books and manuscripts whose mere catalogue
made learned mouths in distant parts of Europe water and learned lungs
sigh in hopeless envy. He too had officials under him, but they were
unlike the others: meek youths, studious and short-sighted, whose
business as far as Priscilla could see was to bow themselves out
silently whenever she and her lady-in-waiting came in. The librarian's
name was Fritzing; plain Herr Fritzing originally, but gradually by
various stages at last arrived at the dignity and sonorousness of Herr
Geheimarchivrath Fritzing. The Grand Duke indeed had proposed to
ennoble him after he had successfully taught Priscilla English
grammar, but Fritzing, whose spirit dwelt among the Greeks, could not
be brought to see any desirability in such a step. Priscilla called
him Fritzi when her lady-in-waiting dozed; dearest Fritzi sometimes
even, in the heat of protest or persuasion. But afterwards, leaving
the room as solemnly as she had come in, followed by her wide-awake
attendant, she would nod a formally gracious "Good afternoon, Herr
Geheimrath," for all the world as though she had been talking that way
the whole time. The Countess (her lady-in-waiting was the Countess
Irmgard von Disthal, an ample slow lady, the unmarried daughter of a
noble house, about fifty at this time, and luckily--or unluckily--for
Priscilla, a great lover of much food and its resultant deep slumbers)
would bow in her turn in as stately a manner as her bulk permitted,
and with a frigidity so pronounced that in any one less skilled in
shades of deportment it would have resembled with a singular
completeness a sniff of scorn. Her frigidity was perfectly justified.
Was she not a _hochgeboren_, a member of an ancient house, of luminous
pedigree as far back as one could possibly see? And was he not the son
of an obscure Westphalian farmer, a person who in his youth had sat
barefoot watching pigs? It is true he had learning, and culture, and a
big head with plenty of brains in it, and the Countess Disthal had a
small head, hardly any brains, no soul to speak of, and no education.
This, I say, is true; but it is also neither here nor there. The
Countess was the Countess, and Fritzing was a nobody, and the
condescension she showed him was far more grand ducal than anything in
that way that Priscilla could or ever did produce.
Fritzing, unusually gifted, and enterprising from the first--which
explains the gulf between pig-watching and _Hofbibliothekar_--had
spent ten years in Paris and twenty in England in various capacities,
but always climbing higher in the world of intellect, and had come
during this climbing to speak English quite as well as most
Englishmen, if in a statelier, Johnsonian manner. At fifty he began
his career in Kunitz, and being a lover of children took over the
English education of the three princesses; and now that they had long
since learned all they cared to know, and in Priscilla's case all of
grammar at least that he had to teach, he invented a talent for
drawing in Priscilla, who could not draw a straight line, much less a
curved one, so that she should still be able to come to the library as
often as she chose on the pretext of taking a drawing-lesson. The
Grand Duke's idea about his daughters was that they should know a
little of everything and nothing too well; and if Priscilla had said
she wanted to study Shakespeare with the librarian he would have
angrily forbidden it. Had she not had ten years for studying
Shakespeare? To go on longer than that would mean that she was eager,
and the Grand Duke loathed an eager woman.
But he had nothing to say against a little drawing; and it was during
the drawing-lessons of the summer Priscilla was twenty-one that the
Countess Disthal slept so peacefully. The summer was hot, and the vast
room cool and quiet. The time was three o'clock--immediately, that is,
after luncheon. Through the narrow open windows sweet airs and scents
came in from the bright world outside. Sometimes a bee would wander up
from the fruit-gardens below, and lazily drone round shady corners.
Sometimes a flock of pigeons rose swiftly in front of the windows,
with a flash of shining wings. Every quarter of an hour the cathedral
clock down in the town sent up its slow chime. Voices of people
boating on the river floated up too, softened to melodiousness. Down
at the foot of the hill the red roofs of the town glistened in the
sun. Beyond them lay the sweltering cornfields. Beyond them forests
and villages. Beyond them a blue line of hills. Beyond them, said
Priscilla to herself, freedom. She sat in her white dress at a table
in one of the deep windows, her head on its long slender neck, where
the little rings of red-gold hair curled so prettily, bent over the
drawing-board, her voice murmuring ceaselessly, for time was short and
she had a great many things to say. At her side sat Fritzing,
listening and answering. Far away in the coolest, shadiest corner of
the room slumbered the Countess. She was lulled by the murmured talk
as sweetly as by the drone of the bee.
"Your Grand Ducal Highness receives many criticisms and much advice on
the subject of drawing from the Herr Geheimrath?" she said one day,
after a lesson during which she had been drowsily aware of much talk.
"The Herr Geheimrath is most conscientious," said Priscilla in the
stately, it-has-nothing-to-do-with-you sort of tone she found most
effectual with the Countess; but she added a request under her breath
that the _lieber Gott_ might forgive her, for she knew she had told a
fib.
Indeed, the last thing that Fritzing was at this convulsed period of
his life was what his master would have called conscientious. Was he
not encouraging the strangest, wickedest, wildest ideas in the
Princess? Strange and wicked and wild that is from the grand ducal
point of view, for to Priscilla they seemed all sweetness and light.
Fritzing had a perfect horror of the Grand Duke. He was everything
that Fritzing, lean man of learning, most detested. The pleasantest
fashion of describing the Grand Duke will be simply to say that he was
in all things, both of mind and body, the exact opposite of Fritzing.
Fritzing was a man who spent his time ignoring his body and digging
away at his mind. You know the bony aspect of such men. Hardly ever is
there much flesh on them; and though they are often ugly enough, their
spirit blazes at you out of wonderful eyes. I call him old Fritzing,
for he was sixty. To me he seemed old; to Priscilla at twenty he
seemed coeval with pyramids and kindred hoarinesses; while to all
those persons who were sixty-one he did not seem old at all. Only two
things could have kept this restless soul chained to the service of
the Grand Duke, and those two things were the unique library and
Priscilla. For the rest, his life at Kunitz revolted him. He loathed
the etiquette and the fuss and the intrigues of the castle. He loathed
each separate lady-in-waiting, and every one of the male officials. He
loathed the vulgar abundance and inordinate length and frequency of
the meals, when down in the town he knew there were people a-hungered.
He loathed the lacqueys with a quite peculiar loathing, scowling at
them from under angry eyebrows as he passed from his apartment to the
library; yet such is the power of an independent and scornful spirit
that though they had heard all about Westphalia and the pig-days never
once had they, who made insolence their study, dared be rude to him.
Priscilla wanted to run away. This, I believe, is considered an awful
thing to do even if you are only a housemaid or somebody's wife. If it
were not considered awful, placed by the world high up on its list of
Utter Unforgivablenesses, there is, I suppose, not a woman who would
not at some time or other have run. She might come back, but she would
surely have gone. So bad is it held to be that even a housemaid who
runs is unfailingly pursued by maledictions more or less definite
according to the education of those she has run from; and a wife who
runs is pursued by social ruin, it being taken for granted that she
did not run alone. I know at least two wives who did run alone. Far
from wanting yet another burden added to them by adding to their lives
yet another man, they were anxiously endeavouring to get as far as
might be from the man they had got already. The world, foul hag with
the downcast eyes and lascivious lips, could not believe it possible,
and was quick to draw its dark mantle of disgrace over their shrinking
heads. One of them, unable to bear this, asked her husband's pardon.
She was a weak spirit, and now lives prostrate days, crushed beneath
the unchanging horror of a husband's free forgiveness. The other took
a cottage and laughed at the world. Was she not happy at last, and
happy in the right way? I go to see her sometimes, and we eat the
cabbages she has grown herself. Strange how the disillusioned find
their peace in cabbages.
Priscilla, then, wanted to run away. What is awful in a housemaid and
in anybody's wife became in her case stupendous. The spirit that could
resolve it, decide to do it without being dragged to it by such things
as love or passion, calmly looking the risks and losses in the face,
and daring everything to free itself, was, it must be conceded, at
least worthy of respect. Fritzing thought it worthy of adoration; the
divinest spirit that had ever burned within a woman. He did not
say so. On the contrary, he was frightened, and tried angrily,
passionately, to dissuade. Yet he knew that if she wavered he would
never forgive her; she would drop at once from her high estate into
those depths in his opinion where the dull average of both sexes
sprawled for ever in indiscriminate heaps. Priscilla never dreamed of
wavering. She, most poetic of princesses, made apparently of ivory and
amber, outwardly so cool and serene and gentle, was inwardly on fire.
The fire, I should add, burnt with a very white flame. Nothing in
the shape of a young man had ever had the stoking of it. It was
that whitest of flames that leaps highest at the thought of
abstractions--freedom, beauty of life, simplicity, and the rest. This,
I would remark, is a most rare light to find burning in a woman's
breast. What she was, however, Fritzing had made her. True the
material had been extraordinarily good, and for ten years he had
done as he liked with it. Beginning with the simpler poems of
Wordsworth--he detested them, but they were better than soiling her
soul with Longfellow and Mrs. Hemans--those lessons in English
literature, meant by the authorities to be as innocuous to her as to
her sisters, had opened her eyes in a way nothing else could have done
to the width of the world and the littleness of Kunitz. With that good
teacher, as eager to lead as she to follow, she wandered down the
splendid walks of culture, met there the best people of all ages,
communed with mighty souls, heard how they talked, saw how they lived,
and none, not one, lived and talked as they lived and talked at
Kunitz.
Imagine a girl influenced for ten years, ten of her softest most
wax-like years, by a Fritzing, taught to love freedom, to see the
beauty of plain things, of quietness, of the things appertaining to
the spirit, taught to see how ignoble it is, how intensely, hopelessly
vulgar to spend on one's own bodily comforts more than is exactly
necessary, taught to see a vision of happiness possible only to those
who look to their minds for their joys and not to their bodies,
imagine how such a girl, hearing these things every afternoon almost
of her life, would be likely to regard the palace mornings and
evenings, the ceremonies and publicity, all those hours spent as
though she were a celebrated picture, forced everlastingly to stand in
an attitude considered appropriate and smile while she was being
looked at.
"No one," she said one day to Fritzing, "who hasn't himself been a
princess can have the least idea of what it is like."
"Ma'am, it would be more correct to say herself in place of himself."
"Well, they can't," said Priscilla.
"Ma'am, to begin a sentence with the singular and continue it with the
plural is an infraction of all known rules."
"But the sentiments, Fritzi--what do you think of the sentiments?"
"Alas, ma'am, they too are an infraction of rules."
"What is not in this place, I should like to know?" sighed Priscilla,
her chin on her hand, her eyes on that distant line of hills beyond
which, she told herself, lay freedom.
She had long ago left off saying it only to herself. I think she must
have been about eighteen when she took to saying it aloud to Fritzing.
At first, before he realized to what extent she was sick for freedom,
he had painted in glowing colours the delights that lay on the other
side of the hills, or for that matter on this side of them if you were
alone and not a princess. Especially had he dwelt on the glories of
life in England, glories attainable indeed only by the obscure such as
he himself had been, and for ever impossible to those whom Fate
obliges to travel in state carriages and special trains. Then he had
come to scent danger and had grown wary; trying to put her off with
generalities, such as the inability of human beings to fly from their
own selves, and irrelevancies such as the amount of poverty and
wretchedness to be observed in the east of London; refusing to discuss
France, which she was always getting to as the first step towards
England, except in as far as it was a rebellious country that didn't
like kings; pointing out with no little temper that she had already
seen England; and finishing by inquiring very snappily when her Grand
Ducal Highness intended to go on with her drawing.
Now what Priscilla had seen of England had been the insides of
Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle; of all insides surely the most
august. To and from these she had been conveyed in closed carriages
and royal trains, and there was so close a family likeness between
them and Kunitz that to her extreme discomfort she had felt herself
completely at home. Even the presence of the Countess Disthal had not
been wanting. She therefore regarded this as not seeing England at
all, and said so. Fritzing remarked tartly that it was a way of seeing
it most English people would envy her; and she was so unable to
believe him that she said Nonsense.
But lately her desires had taken definite shape so rapidly that he had
come to dread the very word hill and turn cold at the name of England.
He was being torn in different directions; for he was, you see, still
trying to do what other people had decided was his duty, and till a
man gives up doing that he will certainly be torn. How great would be
the temptation to pause here and consider the mangled state of such a
man, the wounds and weakness he will suffer from, and how his soul
will have to limp through life, if it were not that I must get on with
Priscilla.
One day, after many weeks of edging nearer to it, of going all round
it yet never quite touching it, she took a deep breath and told him
she had determined to run away. She added an order that he was to help
her. With her most grand ducal air she merely informed, ordered, and
forbade. What she forbade, of course, was the betrayal of her plans.
"You may choose," she said, "between the Grand Duke and myself. If you
tell him, I have done with you for ever."
Of course he chose Priscilla.
His agonies now were very great. Those last lacerations of conscience
were terrific. Then, after nights spent striding, a sudden calm fell
upon him. At length he could feel what he had always seen, that there
could not be two duties for a man, that no man can serve two masters,
that a man's one clear duty is to be in the possession of his soul and
live the life it approves: in other and shorter words, instead of
leading Priscilla, Priscilla was now leading him.
She did more than lead him; she drove him. The soul he had so
carefully tended and helped to grow was now grown stronger than his
own; for there was added to its natural strength the tremendous daring
of absolute inexperience. What can be more inexperienced than a
carefully guarded young princess? Priscilla's ignorance of the outside
world was pathetic. He groaned over her plans--for it was she who
planned and he who listened--and yet he loved them. She was a divine
woman, he said to himself; the sweetest and noblest, he was certain,
that the world would ever see.
Her plans were these:
First, that having had twenty-one years of life at the top of the
social ladder she was now going to get down and spend the next
twenty-one at the bottom of it. (Here she gave her reasons, and I will
not stop to describe Fritzing's writhings as his own past teachings
grinned at him through every word she said.)
Secondly, that the only way to get to the bottom being to run away
from Kunitz, she was going to run.
Thirdly, that the best and nicest place for living at the bottom would
be England. (Here she explained her conviction that beautiful things
grow quite naturally round the bottom of ladders that cannot easily
reach the top; flowers of self-sacrifice and love, of temperance,
charity, godliness--delicate things, with roots that find their
nourishment in common soil. You could not, said Priscilla, expect soil
at the top of ladders, could you? And as she felt that she too had
roots full of potentialities, she must take them down to where their
natural sustenance lay waiting.)
Fourthly, they were to live somewhere in the country in England, in
the humblest way.
Fifthly, she was to be his daughter.
"Daughter?" cried Fritzing, bounding in his chair. "Your Grand Ducal
Highness forgets I have friends in England, every one of whom is aware
that I never had a wife."
"Niece, then," said Priscilla.
He gazed at her in silence, trying to imagine her his niece. He had
two sisters, and they had stopped exactly at the point they were at
when they helped him, barefoot, to watch Westphalian pigs. I do not
mean that they had not ultimately left the little farm, gone into
stockings, and married. It is their minds I am thinking of, and these
had never budged. They were like their father, a doomed dullard; while
Fritzing's mother, whom he resembled, had been a rather extraordinary
woman in a rough and barbarous way. He found himself wholly unable to
imagine either of his sisters the mother of this exquisite young lady.
These, then, baldly, were Priscilla's plans. The carrying of them out
was left, she informed him, altogether to Fritzing. After having spent
several anxious days, she told him, considering whether she ought to
dye her hair black in order to escape recognition, or stay her own
colour but disguise herself as a man and buy a golden beard, she had
decided that these were questions Fritzing would settle better than
she could. "I'd dye my hair at once," she said, "but what about my
wretched eyelashes? Can one dye eyelashes?"
Fritzing thought not, and anyhow was decidedly of opinion that her
eyelashes should not be tampered with; I think I have said that they
were very lovely. He also entirely discouraged the idea of dressing as
a man. "Your Grand Ducal Highness would only look like an extremely
conspicuous boy," he assured her.
"I could wear a beard," said Priscilla.
But Fritzing was absolutely opposed to the beard.
As for the money part, she never thought of it. Money was a thing she
never did think about. It also, then, was to be Fritzing's business.
Possibly things might have gone on much longer as they were, with a
great deal of planning and talking, and no doing, if an exceedingly
desirable prince had not signified his intention of marrying
Priscilla. This had been done before by quite a number of princes.
They had, that is, not signified, but implored. On their knees would
they have implored if their knees could have helped them. They were
however all poor, and Priscilla and her sisters were rich; and how
foolish, said the Grand Duke, to marry poor men unless you are poor
yourself. The Grand Duke, therefore, took these young men aside and
crushed them, while Priscilla, indifferent, went on with her drawing.
But now came this one who was so eminently desirable that he had no
need to do more than merely signify. There had been much trouble and a
great deal of delay in finding him a wife, for he had insisted on
having a princess who should be both pretty and not his cousin. Europe
did not seem to contain such a thing. Everybody was his cousin, except
two or three young women whom he was rude enough to call ugly. The
Kunitz princesses had been considered in their turn and set aside, for
they too were cousins; and it seemed as if one of the most splendid
thrones in Europe would either have to go queen-less or be sat upon by
somebody plain, when fate brought the Prince to a great public
ceremony in Kunitz, and he saw Priscilla and fell so violently in love
with her that if she had been fifty times his cousin he would still
have married her.
That same evening he signified his intention to the delighted Grand
Duke, who immediately fell to an irrelevant praising of God.
"Bosh," said the Prince, in the nearest equivalent his mother-tongue
provided.
This was very bad. Not, I mean, that the Prince should have said Bosh,
for he was so great that there was not a Grand Duke in Europe to whom
he might not have said it if he wanted to; but that Priscilla should
have been in imminent danger of marriage. Among Fritzing's many
preachings there had been one, often repeated in the strongest
possible language, that of all existing contemptibilities the very
most contemptible was for a woman to marry any one she did not love;
and the peroration, also extremely forcible, had been an announcement
that the prince did not exist who was fit to tie her shoestrings. This
Priscilla took to be an exaggeration, for she had no very great notion
of her shoestrings; but she did agree with the rest. The subject
however was an indifferent one, her father never yet having asked her
to marry anybody; and so long as he did not do so she need not, she
thought, waste time thinking about it. Now the peril was upon her,
suddenly, most unexpectedly, very menacingly. She knew there was no
hope from the moment she saw her father's face quite distorted by
delight. He took her hand and kissed it. To him she was already a
queen. As usual she gave him the impression of behaving exactly as he
could have wished. She certainly said very little, for she had long
ago learned the art of being silent; but her very silences were
somehow exquisite, and the Grand Duke thought her perfect. She gave
him to understand almost without words that it was a great surprise,
an immense honour, a huge compliment, but so sudden that she would be
grateful to both himself and the Prince if nothing more need be said
about it for a week or two--nothing, at least, till formal
negotiations had been opened. "I saw him yesterday for the first
time," she pleaded, "so naturally I am rather overwhelmed."
Privately she had thought, his eyes, which he had never taken off her,
kind and pleasant; and if she had known of his having said Bosh who
knows but that he might have had a chance? As it was, the moment she
was alone she sent flying for Fritzing. "What," she said, "do you say
to my marrying this man?"
"If you do, ma'am," said Fritzing, and his face seemed one blaze of
white conviction, "you will undoubtedly be eternally lost."