“I would say rather that you were like the Empress Elisabeth,” rejoined Martin. It seemed to him that they had always been there, that they would always remain there—he and this woman whose very name he did not know.
“Why am I like the Empress Elisabeth?” she asked.
“Haven’t you read Christomanos?”
“What is that?”
“Your ignorance is the first gratification my vanity has had to-day!” laughed Martin. “Christomanos is the hero of a modern fairy story—which is all the prettier for being true. It is a kind of inverted ‘Cinderella.’ He was a little Greek student in the university of Vienna, who lived in a garret in an alley. You know the kind? With stair gables, and bread shops, and clothes lines? Imagine a Greek there! And one day a court carriage rumbled up, just as if it had suddenly rolled out of a pumpkin, and carried him off to talk Greek to the empress. The carriage came every morning after that; and he would spend the day in the imperial park at Lainz, and go back at night to his stair gable. And at last he went to live in the palace altogether, and talked to the empress while she had her hair combed, and walked leagues with her, and went to Schönbrunn and Miramar and Corfu. Of course the ladies-in-waiting were scandalised, but she was used to that—and he was something of a poet.”
“And after she died he wrote a book about it. Which shows how true a poet he was!”
“Wait till you read him. The thing was that people said such things about her, and he knew better; and it hurt him. Of course he couldn’t help seeing the picturesqueness of it all, but he isn’t nasty about it. Most of it is what she said about things.”
“What did she say about things?”
Martin watched the profile beside him, out-lined against the marble of the tower and touched faintly by the glow of the westering sun.
“Well, one thing was a good deal like what you just told me about high places. Christomanos says that she always liked hills because there are so few untrampled places in the world.”