She followed him to the front door, overtaking him as his hand was on the latch.
"Hold on," she said, nervously glancing at the shifty-eyed, cringing assistant who toiled not in vain,—no one ever toiled in vain in the establishment of M. Jacobs, Inc.,—behind a clump of chairs;—"hold on a second. I don't want you to say a word to—to them about—about all this. You are right, de Bosky. I—I have not lost all that once was mine. You understand, don't you?"
He smiled. "Perfectly. You can never lose it, no matter how low you may sink."
"Well," she went on, hesitatingly, "suppose we forget it."
He eyed her for a moment in silence, shaking his head reflectively. "It is most astonishing," he said at last.
"What's astonishing?" she demanded sharply.
"I was merely thinking of your perfect, your exquisite French, madam!"
"French? Are you nutty? I've been talkin' to you in English all the time."
He nodded his head slowly. "Perhaps that is why your French is so astonishing," he said, and let it go at that.
"Look at me," she exclaimed, suddenly breaking into French as she spread out her thick arms and surveyed with disgust as much of her ample person as came within range of an obstructed vision, "just look at me. No one on earth would take me for a princess, would he? And yet that is just what I am. I think of myself as a princess, and always will, de Bosky. I think of myself,—of my most unlovely, unregal self,—as the superior of every other woman who treads the streets of New York, all of these base born women. I cannot help it. I cannot think of them as equals, not even the richest and the most arrogant of them. You say it is the blood, but you are wrong. Some of these women have a strain of royal blood in them—a far-off, remote strain, of course,—but they do not know it. That's the point, my friend. It is the knowing that makes us what we are. It isn't the blood itself. If we were deprived of the power to think, we could have the blood of every royal family in Europe in our veins, and that is all the good it would do us. We think we are nobler, better than all the rest of creation, and we would keep on thinking it if we slept in the gutter and begged for a crust of bread. And the proof of all this is to be found in the fact that the rest of creation will not allow us to forget. They think as we do, in spite of themselves, and there you have the secret of the supremacy we feel, in spite of everything."