“That is cruel,” Her Serenity observed.
“I crave Your Grace’s pardon,” I disagreed; “it is true: that is all.”
“Truth never masquerades in the domino of drollity.”
“Thy reproof, O Queen, is deserved. Would that I were Boswell to preserve in the amber of biography the gems which fall from the lips of a Doctress Johnson.”
“Scribe, know you not that a woman would rather you praised her face than her mind, and her bonnet rather than her ‘blue stockings’? Why write what you don’t believe?”
“Had my eyes been gladdened by the sight of your charms, fair Queen,” I boldly asserted, “I should have thrown off the fetters of prose and soared to the Mount of Parnassus, there to coronate you in verse with feet iambic.”
“Perhaps the feet might limp—I mean they would, of course, be limpidly lyrical. But my poet laureate, don’t metrically measure My Majesty. Cork the rhythmic bottle and all shall be forgiven. And now you may tell me your mission.”
“I’ve come to interview you,” I blurted out, instinctively putting my hand on my vest pocket, in which was a bottle of aromatic spirits of ammonia. But Her Grace has a spirit of her own and needed none of mine. There was no evidence of vertigo.
“Don’t be alarmed,” I hastened to say. It was a needless assurance, but according to all precedent, I was expected to make the observation. “I wrote the interview before I came down here to see you, and it is now in type with a turn rule at the end for fear it should not measure up to expectations. This call is a mere matter of form.”
“But how”—