“Our opinion is that the matter is not worth bothering about.”
“Yes, but what do you think—?”
Maya looked up from her darning, in mild but candid surprise. “You really do ask the silliest questions! For one, I do not think at all about those outcast tramps and vagabonds except to see that they steal nothing as they go by.”
So then Gerald questioned her about Freydis.
“I have heard of the woman,” said Maya, rather absent-mindedly, as she went on with the darning upon which stayed fixed her actual attention,—“of course: but nothing to her credit. They report, for example, that she has a mirror—”
“I, too, have heard continually of that mirror, but never of exactly what she does with it.”
“For that matter, Gerald, I also have a mirror, if that is all which is needed. Everybody has a mirror. In fact, I have a number of mirrors.”
“I know. I have noticed them everywhere about the cottage. But all your mirrors, dear lady, are rose-colored.”
—To which Maya replied irrelevantly, and without looking up from her darning: “But did you not know from the first that I was a wise woman? In any case, it is said that Queen Freydis holds her mirror up to nature, and that she does not scruple to hold this mirror up to her disreputable visitors, too. For they really are, you know. It is all very well being a god while it lasts. Only, it never does. And then where are you? Why, exactly! That is why the overlords of Turoine have always seemed to me more business-like. And there is no flaw in it, people say,”—now, though, as Gerald deduced, Maya was talking about the Mirror of the Hidden Children,—“no distortion of any kind, no flattering in it, and no kindly exaggeration. It is not in anything like my more sensible rose-colored mirrors. And nobody could of course be expected to approve of such a mirror.”
“Nevertheless, if there indeed be any such mirror, I mean to face it, when to-morrow I enter into my kingdom, and liberate the great words of the Master Philologist, and restore the Dirghic mythology, for in that mythology, I must tell you, I am a god with four aspects.”