“Get behind me, ignoble impulse of pique! Mine other cheek, turn thou for a blow!” Lowering his face to hers, he added, most unexpectedly: “I don’t mind admitting that you make it hard for me to be mean. Except that I have a reputation for meanness which I must deserve—Anyhow, it’s your turn to tell me something nice.”
“But—why—” stammered Dolores. “I don’t understand——”
“Oh, yes you do. Something nice that you think about me.”
Despite what she knew of him, the girl-shade was caught by something of his own amusement at himself.
“I think,” she offered, “that at times you seem a very good deal of a human being.”
Clamping the plane’s “joy stick” between his knees, His Majesty threw up both hands toward the glory of his imitation sky.
“As bad as that?” he exclaimed.
She could see, through his affected horror, that he was complimented.
“For the smallest of favors, even though forced, I thank you,” he said with an appearance of sincerity. “That, my child, is what I’d like best to seem to be—just a long-lasting man.”
“My child!” The unctuousness of his two words of address, emphasized by his smug contemplation of her face, made Dolores turn away with a new uneasy wonder. Some one on Earth had called her “my child” with that same accent and gaze. Who?