"Not if they see him first!" I replied grimly, and he went out.
CHAPTER XIII
THE PRINCE—PRINCIPALLY
It was all well enough for me to say—as I had to to Tillie many a time—that it was ridiculous to make a fuss over a person for what, after all, was an accident of birth. It was well enough for me to say that it was only by chance that I wasn't strutting about with a crown on my head and a man blowing a trumpet to let folks know I was coming, and by the same token and the same chance Prince Oskar might have been a red-haired spring-house girl, breaking the steels in her figure stooping over to ladle mineral water out of a hole in the earth.
Nevertheless, at five o'clock, after every one had gone, when I saw Miss Patty, muffled in furs, tripping out through the snow, with a tall thin man beside her, walking very straight and taking one step to her four, I felt as though somebody had hit me at the end of my breast-bone.
They stopped a minute outside before they came in, and I had to take myself in hand.
"Now look here, Minnie, you idiot," I said to myself, "this is America; you're as good as he is; not a bend of the knee or a stoop of the neck. And if he calls you 'my good girl' hit him."
They came in together, laughing and talking, and, to be honest, if I hadn't caught the back of a chair, I'd have had one foot back of the other and been making a courtesy in spite of myself.
"We're late, Minnie!" Miss Patty said. "Oskar, this is one of my best friends, and you are to be very nice to her."