ual. "Well, have you made any more
blunders?"

"Not one. You have nothing to reproach me with this time, Czarina."

"You kept Mr. Hartman up dreadfully late. What were you talking about so
long?"

"O, he is prepared to find you wonderful, and to come to time whenever
you want him. I told him your wings weren't grown yet: you were the
Sleeping Beauty in the Enchanted Palace; the hour and the man hadn't
arrived. You dwelt in maiden meditation, and the rest of it."

"You did not cheapen me, surely, Robert?"

"God forbid: do I hold you cheap, that I should rate you so to others?
He may tell you every word I said, when you begin to turn him inside
out; there was none of it that you or I need be ashamed of. He knows,
both by his own observation and from my clear and impressive narrative,
that you are remote and inaccessible--the edelweiss growing high up in
its solitude, where only the daring and the elect can find its haunt."

"That is very neat. Did it take you three hours to tell him that? I
heard you come in as it struck two."

"Too bad to disturb your slumbers, Princess: we will take our boots off
outside, next time. Naturally you were the most important topic we could
discuss; but I also explained his advantages in being thrown so much
into my own society. O, he is getting on. He said--"

"I don't want to know what he said. The man is here, and I can see--and
hear, when I choose--for myself. Do you think I would tempt you to
violate what might be a confidence, Robert?"

"But if I repeat to you what I said, why not what he said?--except that
his observations would not be so powerful and suggestive as mine, of
course. Otherwise I don't see the difference."

"Now that is stupid, Bob. The difference is that you belong to me, and
he doesn't--as yet."

I can't tell you how she says these things. If I could put on paper the
tone, the toss of that lovely head, the smile, the sparkle of eyes and
lips, that go with what you might call these little audacities, then you
would know how they not only accent and punctuate the text, but supply
whole commentaries on it. If you get a notion that the Princess is
capable of boldness, or vulgar coquetry, or any of the faults of her sex
or of ours, you are away off the track, and my engineering must have
gone wrong. But I must stop this and get back to my report.

"One thing I must repeat, Princess. I got off a lot of wisdom for Jim's
benefit. You wouldn't think how wise it was