“Sure, at one of the public afternoon receptions, when everybody went to shake hands with the President.”
“General Sheridan was quite taken with Jenny,” continued Twain. “He told me he went to the show night after night and didn’t care how much he applauded her young beauty and fascinating voice. Yes, Phil was really smitten with Jenny. And now the admired of the most famous General of Horse defies the world to become an acknowledged royal mistress, and her sprig of royalty the black sheep of a crowned family by no means lily-white at that. She reminds me of old Field Marshal Prince de Ligne, making love to a very young girl and succeeding, or nearly succeeding, before he had time to reflect.
“‘A million,’ cried the Field Marshal, ‘if I was a lieutenant now.’”
“ELIZABETH WAS A HE,” SAID MARK
“Mark my word, Elizabeth was a he,” said Clemens, when I was starting for London the end of June, 1894, leaving the Clemenses at the Normandie, Paris, “and when you have a little time in England, I wish you would look up all that pesky question for me.”
“Not in Westminster Abbey?” I cried in alarm.
“Now, don’t you try to be gay,” said Mark. “It’s bad enough if I got that reputation when I want to be taken seriously. I know they haven’t got through ascertaining for the ’teenth time whether Charles I really lost his head when his overbearing noddle dropped into the basket on the scaffold opposite the Horse-Guards—you showed me the spot yourself. I don’t want any ghoulish work done. Just go to the British Museum and every other library and nose up everything appertaining to Queen Elizabeth’s manly character. You get the authorities (for a consideration, of course) and I’ll do the rest. Then you go down Surrey-way and find a place or castle or summer house called Overcourt, or something. That’s where Elizabeth lived in her teens, and metamorphosed into a boy.”
“But the editor will never allow you to write on such a subject. Better let me do it.”
“Not on your life,” said Mark. “It’s my discovery, and I’m paying you for the work you do, just as the New York ‘World’ and the ‘Sun’ do. When you come down to hard tacks you will find that there are no questionable proceedings whatever, just an exchange of babies, as in the old-time operas, Troubadour and the rest. The Editor will have no kick coming.”
“The Editor,” of course, was Mrs. Clemens, who as a rule censored Mark’s manuscript—“tooth-combed it,” as he called it, cutting out such gems as “the affairs of the Cat who had a family in every Port.”