"O, he is prepared to find you wonderful, and to come to time whenever you want him. I told him your wings weren't grown yet: you were the Sleeping Beauty in the Enchanted Palace; the hour and the man hadn't arrived. You dwelt in maiden meditation, and the rest of it."
"You did not cheapen me, surely, Robert?"
"God forbid: do I hold you cheap, that I should rate you so to others? He may tell you every word I said, when you begin to turn him inside out; there was none of it that you or I need be ashamed of. He knows, both by his own observation and from my clear and impressive narrative, that you are remote and inaccessible—the edelweiss growing high up in its solitude, where only the daring and the elect can find its haunt."
"That is very neat. Did it take you three hours to tell him that? I heard you come in as it struck two."
"Too bad to disturb your slumbers, Princess: we will take our boots off outside, next time. Naturally you were the most important topic we could discuss; but I also explained his advantages in being thrown so much into my own society. O, he is getting on. He said—"
"I don't want to know what he said. The man is here, and I can see—and hear, when I choose—for myself. Do you think I would tempt you to violate what might be a confidence, Robert?"
"But if I repeat to you what I said, why not what he said?—except that his observations would not be so powerful and suggestive as mine, of course. Otherwise I don't see the difference."
"Now that is stupid, Bob. The difference is that you belong to me, and he doesn't—as yet."
I can't tell you how she says these things. If I could put on paper the tone, the toss of that lovely head, the smile, the sparkle of eyes and lips, that go with what you might call these little audacities, then you would know how they not only accent and punctuate the text, but supply whole commentaries on it. If you get a notion that the Princess is capable of boldness, or vulgar coquetry, or any of the faults of her sex or of ours, you are away off the track, and my engineering must have gone wrong. But I must stop this and get back to my report.
"One thing I must repeat, Princess. I got off a lot of wisdom for Jim's benefit. You wouldn't think how wise it was; deep principles of human nature, and rules for the conduct of life, and such. It did him no end of good: and then he said that if I didn't talk to you that way, you couldn't know me as well as he does."