Whatever will power I possessed was necessary to keep my eyes away from the “maiden of the moment.” English blood may be phlegmatic enough to turn into ice water, but a twenty-years’ acquaintance with American girls will thaw the most frozen cardiac organ and render it susceptible to the wiles of any witch of a woman who in other days might have hanged at Salem. Elizabeth’s very voice was a caress and sometimes a man forgets to pray, “Lead me not into temptation!”
“The sweeter memories are in themselves,” I murmured, “the more loth one is to share them with another. If it please Your Grace, we won’t discuss the—the ‘other girl.’ When a man proposes and the woman disposes of him by a verbal spanking, sending him away, it may be to the embraces of another girl, it may be to cherish a memory, he is seldom in a frame of mind inculcated by gospel precepts. Gratitude comes later. Yet whether a man marries or whether he remains true to his ideal, he never loves any other woman quite so much as she who was pitiless to his pleading. Man’s heart is not like a Manhattan hall room with space for only one pair of shoes under the bed, but it is a St. Regis, in which there are no vacant guest chambers. The cosiest corner of a man’s heart is always reserved for the woman who has refused his hand.”
Her Majesty threw up her hands in a pretty gesture of mock dismay.
“A misogamist also! I am just dying with curiosity to know what terrible things my sex have done to you to make you a hater of men, of women and of marriage. Because some sunflower of a girl has turned her face to another son is no excuse for you to sulk behind a cloud. This may be the age of folly, as you claim, but don’t you think that the greatest fool is he who allows a slip of a girl to rob him of his couleur de rose spectacles? Come now, ’fess up! Aren’t you making a hobby of being a hypochondriac? If you linger among the graves of the gloaming with a heart so full of shadows and eyes so abrim with tears that you cannot see beauty as it is born, you corrupt the present. If you fellowship with to-day, it will bestow upon you its purple. If you bid away the hour that is here to make you happy, all the grief of Niobe will not win it back again. To-day is a nomad who tarries awhile, then folds his tent and whistles away on his happy gypsy journey, never to return.”
“Aren’t we getting rather too philosophical for actors in an opera bouffe and too solemn for characters in an hysterical novel; nobody takes history seriously nowadays. This is the hour of hyperbole as well as the age of folly and my indictment of fleshly fools should be taken cum grano salis. I am not so wrapped about by the despairs of night that I can get no glimpse of the dawn. I despise not the outward beauty, nor do I put contempt upon flesh nor call it unclean. I wield no surgeon’s scalpel to dissect desires which passion into degeneracy. Yet I deplore that man, who may stature divinely great, should stoop to crucify the mystery of the flesh in permitting the sanctities of the soul to be overshadowed by sensuality, in making vulgar that which should be hallowed. Yet humanity is no windfall apple; despite the blemishes on the rind, the core continues sound. However pessimistic a man may be, he must acknowledge that the influence of virtue is more far reaching than the contagion of vice. Jean Valjean in the Paris sewer was the optimist who originated the New Thought movement; like him, I feel instinctively that somewhere beyond the present darkness is the sunshine of life and safety.”
“It seems to me, sirrah, that you are rather inconsistent.”
“You women have enjoyed a monopoly of that comfortable privilege altogether too long, and the time has come when man can dispute your prerogative.”
The asbestos tablets I had brought with me were rapidly being filled with hieroglyphics which looked like the original Greek and to understand them needed an acquaintance with Pitman; I must economize on my questions.
“The one indispensable interrogation in an interview is how you spend each waking moment of the day,” I hinted. “No post-mortem recollections would be complete without that.”
“To be a queen is to lead the life effective as well as the life strenuous. This is one day’s doings in the role of Regina, as ticked off by the hours—figuratively, of course, for you are aware that there are no clocks in Hades: