“Well,” she said finally.
That wasn’t what I had expected at all. All the books I had ever read about queens had quoted the ruler thusly: “Her Majesty is graciously pleased to incline her ear that she may hear the prayer of her servant.” I noticed that her ears kept their normal position, but I was not inclined to be fastidious: the queen had spoken!
My lips being now unlocked, I told who I was.
“Oh, to be sure,” Her Grace said, with ready recollection. “You are the novelist who said so many nice things about me in ‘The Virgin Throned in the West.’ You possess the first requisite of a courtier: a knowledge of the gentle art of flattery. Your compliments—”
“Spare me, good Queen,” I interrupted. “I must confess that I wrote that eulogy before I had seen your Majesty.”
The queen frowned just a little.
“Why need you have said that?” she asked. “Even an immortal queen is enough like her mortal sisters not to relish a stab at vanity. You men praise us women and then ruffle our hair by saying you didn’t mean it. Of course, we forgive you, but to forget is not so easy. Under the scar, the wound still aches.”
Ever since then I have believed that a man should be arrested for exposing the naked truth.
“In that book you also paid tender tribute to the babies, though I fail to see what they have to do with an old maid queen who achieved fame but not matrimony. Let us hope that tribute, at least, is sincere.”
“No, only sentimental. I wrote that eulogy far from the maddening child, with naught but memory to lend wings to the imagination. I love to play with other people’s toddling darlings until there is a cry of distress from the interior department, in which case distance lends enchantment to the point of view. I have not always said nice things about babies, for, as I heard Methuselah say, there comes a time in the life of every man when he sighs for the power of Herod that he might order all children killed. Methuselah excepted his own; I don’t.”