“No,” she replied. “No, indeed!”
“Well; you have in reality only one day—your little span of life in the stretch of eternity. You must do the best you can with it; you won’t get another. You must enjoy it; you will never have a chance to enjoy another. You must be happy and contented and useful in it; to-morrow you vanish. And you tell me you’re going to spend it with a man you don’t love, spend it in this cold, empty, silly life of kissing hands and bowing and strutting, of vanity and gilt. What a life—what a miserable, degrading death-in-life!”
“You don’t understand,” she repeated, with a suggestion of haughtiness or attempt at haughtiness.
“Well, do you? There you sit—young, beautiful, a woman with love and passion in her eyes, a woman to be loved, to be happy, and to make others happy. And you think yourself superior—you who propose to spend your life in a way that—I’d hate to characterize it. Why did God give you beauty and brains and a common-sense education? Why did He bring you into the world a queen—not a toy queen, not a figurehead of a ‘house,’ but a real, royal queen—queen by the true, divine right? In order that you should act like a slave? That you should be dazzled by spangles like a vulgar peasant—play all your life with puppets like a child—be a puppet?”
“Why do you say these things to me?” She looked at him sadly, all the haughtiness gone from her face and voice.
“Because I love you; that is why. Because I know—it is useless for you to deny it—that you would like to love me—if you dared.”
Her bosom rose and fell rapidly. “Is it true?” she said, looking at him with a thirsty longing in her eyes. “Do you?”
“What does it matter?” He shrugged his shoulders. “I not only love you but I would win you, if you had—”
“Had what? Say it!”
“Courage!”