t her more like a comrade and equal, and less like a
prime minister conferring with his queen! She wanted something more
intimate than the deference that he showed her, and she did not like
his taking it as an accepted fact that she was as worldly-wise as
himself, even though it were true.

She was a woman and wanted to be loved, in spite of the fact that she
had been loved by many men--at least it was so supposed--and had
rejected them.

Each had offered her position, or had wanted her because she was fitted
to match his own great state, or because he was ambitious, or because
she was rich. The man who could love her as she once believed men
could love, and who could give her something else besides approval of
her beauty and her mind, had not disclosed himself. She had begun to
think that he never would, that he did not exist, that he was an
imagination of the playhouse and the novel. The men whom she knew were
careful to show her that they appreciated how distinguished was her
position, and how inaccessible she was to them. They seemed to think
that by so humbling themselves, and by emphasizing her position they
pleased her best, when it was what she wanted them to forget. Each of
them would draw away backward, bowing and protesting that he was
unworthy to raise his eyes to such a prize, but that if she would only
stoop to him, how happy his life would be. Sometimes they meant it
sincerely; sometimes they were gentlemanly adventurers of title, from
whom it was a business proposition, and in either case she turned
restlessly away and asked herself how long it would be before the man
would come who would pick her up on his saddle and gallop off with her,
with his arm around her waist and his horse's hoofs clattering beneath
them, and echoing the tumult in their hearts.

She had known too many great people in the world to feel impressed with
her own position at home in America; but she sometimes compared herself
to the Queen in "In a Balcony," and repeated to herself, with mock
seriousness:--

"And you the marble statue all the time
They praise and point at as preferred to life,
Yet leave for the first breathing woman's cheek,
First dancer's, gypsy's or street balladine's!"

And if it were true, she asked herself, that the man she had imagined
was only an ideal and an illusion, was not King the best of the others,
the unideal and ever-present others? Every one else seemed to think
so.