“Everything about the whole place is restful,” Penelope said,—“your servants with their quaint dresses and slippered feet, your thick carpets, the smell of those strange burning leaves, and, forgive me if I say so, your closed windows. I suppose in time I should have a headache. For a little while it is delicious.”
The Prince sighed.
“Fresh air is good,” he said, “but the air that comes from your streets does not seem to me to be fresh, nor do I like the roar of your great city always in my ears. Here I cut myself off, and I feel that I can think. Duchess, you must try those preserved fruits. They come to me from my own land. I think that the secret of preserving them is not known here. You see, they are packed with rose leaves and lemon plant. There is a golden fig, Miss Penelope,—the fruit of great knowledge, the magical fruit, too, they say. Eat that and close your eyes and you can look back and tell us all the wonders of the past. That is to say,” he added with a faint smile, “if the magic works.”
“But the magic never does work,” she protested with a little sigh, “and I am not in the least interested in the past. Tell me something about the future?”
“Surely that is easier,” he answered. “Over the past we have lost our control,—what has been must remain to the end of time. The future is ours to do what we will with.”
“That sounds so reasonable,” the Duchess declared, “and it is so absolutely false. No one can do what they will with the future. It is the future which does what it will with us.”
The Prince smiled tolerantly.
“It depends a good deal, does it not,” he said, “upon ourselves? Miss Penelope is the daughter of a country which is still young, which has all its future before it, and which, has proclaimed to the world its fixed intention of controlling its own destinies. She, at any rate, should have imbibed the national spirit. You are looking at my curtains,” he added, turning to Penelope. “Let me show you the figures upon them, and I will tell you the allegory.”
He led her to the window, and explained to her for some moments the story of the faded images which represented one chapter out of the mythology of his country. And then she stopped him.
“Always,” she said, “you and I seem to be talking of things that are dead and past, or of a future which is out of our reach. Isn’t it possible to speak now and then of the present?”