"All my life long," he answered. And the peacocks never told how he kissed her.
His Majesty the King and her Majesty the Queen were delighted with the match. The royal father spent hours in telling the young Prince how great a delight his daughter's mind had always been to him, and how he should miss companionship with her when she was far away in Bobitania. All the court agreed with their Highnesses that they had had suspicions of the valet-prince from the very first, and the lackeys mentioned to the Princess the fact that from the first they had suspected the stone-cutter to be something more than appeared on the outside. The Princess Pourquoi became very popular up and down the length and breadth of the kingdom, and the philosophers, as they sipped their wine in the afternoon sunshine, said over and over what a wonderful child she had been, and how they had always prophesied a great destiny for her.
So there was a great wedding, the preparations for which shook Christendom to its foundations. All the crowned heads that were known were there. Barbaric kings from beyond Bobitania graced the ceremony in gorgeous embroidered robes sewn with diamonds and rubies and pearls. No colors that are known could paint the procession with its rainbow tints of banners and of clothing. Man has not senses enough to take in a description of the food that was provided. Peacocks' brains, served in golden dishes, were the simplest viands there.
The Princess Pourquoi was attired in white velvet, with a train eleven feet and six inches long; her lord and master glowed like a tropical bird in scarlet, and Christendom exclaimed that there had never been so beautiful a pair. While the trumpets were blowing and the dishes were rattling, and the after-dinner speeches of the philosophers were reaching their most blatant point, Prince Victor was quietly telling his bride that he had no intention of giving up his occupation of stone-cutter, and none of sitting upon his father's throne unless requested to by all the inhabitants of Bobitania. They talked in snatched whispers about the drawing-schools they would establish for the poor, and the model cottages that should be built from end to end of Bobitania, and they made great plans for the Princess's further work in sculpture. What else they said in sweet whispers, I shall not tell, for it was no one's affair but their own.
The most magnificent guest of all was the fairy godmother who had cursed the bride in her cradle. This wicked person was attired in black samite, made with incredible puffs and a train. She had a stomacher picked out with jet, and wore a very stiff ruff underneath her hooked chin. Her general expression was very fierce, but once she was heard to murmur, hiding a pleased smile behind her bony hand:—
"A pretty age of the world, when not even the curse of a mind can harm a woman!"