find I shall like the fact
of being a Princess--choosing the people I associate with, and being up
above all these European grandees that father and mother bow down to,
though they think they despise them. You can be up above these people by
just being yourself; you know how. But I need a platform--a sky-scraper.
Father and mother slaved to give me my education. They thought education
was the important thing; but, since we've all three of us got mediocre
minds, it has just landed us among mediocre people. Don't you suppose I
see through all the sham science and sham art and sham everything we're
surrounded with? That's why I want to buy a place at the very top, where
I shall be powerful enough to get about me the people I want, the big
people, the right people, and to help them I want to promote culture,
like those Renaissance women you're always talking about. I want to do
it for Apex City; do you understand? And for father and mother too. I
want all those titles carved on my tombstone. They're facts, anyhow!
Don't laugh at me...." She broke off with one of her clumsy smiles, and
moved away from him to the other end of the room.

He sat looking at her with a curious feeling of admiration. Her harsh
positivism was like a tonic to his disenchanted mood, and he thought:
"What a pity!"

Aloud he said: "I don't feel like laughing at you. You're a great
woman."

"Then I shall be a great Princess."

"Oh--but you might have been something so much greater!"

Her face flamed again. "Don't say that!"

He stood up involuntarily, and drew near her.

"Why not?"

"Because you're the only man with whom I can imagine the other kind of
greatness."

It moved him--moved him unexpectedly. He got as far as saying to
himself: "Good God, if she were not so hideously rich--" and then of
yielding for a moment to the persuasive vision of all that he and she
might do with those very riches which he dreaded. After all, there was
nothing mean in her ideals they were hard and material, in keeping with
her primitive and massive person; but they had a certain grim nobility.
And when she spoke of "the other kind of greatness" he knew that she
understood what she was talking of, and was not merely saying something
to draw him on, to get him to commit himself. There was not a drop of
guile in her, except that which her very honesty distilled.

"The other kind of greatness?" he repeated.

"Well, isn't that what you said happiness was? I want