u may talk all night," she cried between her sobs, "about O'Toole and
his beautiful German. They can go hang for me! I am only a servant, I
know. I am poor, I admit it. But poverty isn't a crime. It gives no one
the right to make a dwarf of me. No, no!"--this as Wogan bent down to
lift her from the ground--"plague on you all! I will sit here and die;
and when I am found frozen and dead perhaps you will be sorry for your
cruelty to a poor girl who wanted nothing better than to serve you."
Here Jenny was so moved by the piteousness of her fate that her tears
broke out again. She wept loudly. Wogan was in an extremity of alarm
lest someone should pass, or the people of the house be aroused. He
tried most tenderly to comfort her. She would have none of the
consolations. He took her in his arms and raised her to her feet. She
swore more loudly than she had wept, she kicked at his legs, she struck
at his head with her fist. In another moment she would surely have cried
murder. Wogan had to let her sink back upon the steps, where she fell to
whimpering.

"I am not beautiful, I know; I never boasted that I was; but I have a
figure and limbs that a painter would die to paint. And what do you make
of me? A maggot, a thing all body like a nasty bear. Oh, curse the day
that I set out with such tyrants! A pretty figure of fun I should make
before your beautiful German, covered with mud to the knees. No, you
shall hang me first! Why couldn't O'Toole do his own work, the ninny, I
hate him! He's tall enough, the great donkey; but no, I must do it,
who am shorter, and even then not short enough for him and you, but you
must drag me through the dirt without heels!"

Wogan let her run on; he was at his wits' end what to do. All this
turmoil, these tears, these oaths and blows, came from nothing more
serious than this, that Jenny, to make her height less remarkable, must
wear no heels. It was ludicrous, it was absurd, but none the less the
whole expedition, carried to the very point of completion, must fail,
utterly and irretrievably fail, because Jenny would not for one day go
without her heels. The Princess must remain in her prison at Innspruck;
the Chevalier must lose his wife; the exertions of Wogan and his
friends, their risks, their ingenuity, must bear no fruit because Jenny
would not show herself three inches short of her ordinary height.
O'Toole had warned him there would be a difficulty; but that the
difficulty should become an