“But I was only a boy.”
“You were not the usual type of boy. You are not going to be the usual type of man.”
“You do not mind my loving you?”
“I cannot help it, can I? Nor can you.”
She seated herself on a stone bench facing a sun-dial, and leaning hack, her hands clasped behind her head, looked at me and laughed.
“I shall always love you,” I answered, “but it is with a curious sort of love. I do not understand it myself.”
“Tell me,” she commanded, still with a smile about her lips, “describe it to me.”
I was standing over against her, my arm resting upon the dial's stone column. The sun was sinking, casting long shadows on the velvety grass, illuminating with a golden light her upturned face.
“I would you were some great queen of olden days, and that I might be always near you, serving you, doing your bidding. Your love in return would spoil all; I shall never ask it, never desire it. That I might look upon you, touch now and then at rare intervals with my lips your hand, kiss in secret the glove you had let fall, the shoe you had flung off, know that you knew of my love, that I was yours to do with as you would, to live or die according to your wish. Or that you were priestess in some temple of forgotten gods, where I might steal at daybreak and at dusk to gaze upon your beauty; kneel with clasped hands, watching your sandalled feet coming and going about the altar steps; lie with pressed lips upon the stones your trailing robes had touched.”
She laughed a light mocking laugh. “I should prefer to be the queen. The role of priestess would not suit me. Temples are so cold.” A slight shiver passed through her. She made a movement with her hand, beckoning me to her feet. “That is how you shall love me, Paul,” she said, “adoring me, worshipping me—blindly. I will be your queen and treat you—as it chooses me. All I think, all I do, I will tell you, and you shall tell me it is right. The queen can do no wrong.”