“Well, I have done Vanderlin an enormous service,” she continued. “That is to say, with his peculiar ideas of fidelity, he thinks it enormous. It is the ‘one man one vote’ theory, don’t you know. ‘One life, one love’—that sort of thing. One has read of it. Great bosh, but still—no, pray don’t go on like that or you will bore me to extinction. Listen. You and I can’t marry as we are. We are as poor as church mice. My people won’t and your people can’t do anything for us. But Vanderlin will.”
“Vanderlin!” exclaimed Wuffie. He was dismayed and horrified; he was a young man of easy principles, but there are some scruples which women dance over like a stool at a cotillon, and which men jib at violently as their hunters do at brick walls.
“If your pater ordered you to marry a royal schoolgirl, you’d take her dower fast enough,” she continued; “and yet what disgraceful sources it would come from—opium-taxes, and gin-palace-taxes, and dog-taxes, and poor men’s sixpences and shillings, and nailmakers’ and glassworkers’ pennies, and real coinage, as one may say, out of vice and misery and want.”
“You can’t be a republican—a socialist?” cried Prince Woffram in horror.
“I don’t know whether I am or not. I dare say I may be. Anybody would be to see a little German princeling, with twopence-halfpenny a year, and whose granduncle has just died without money to pay his doctor’s bill, giving himself airs as if he were somebody.”
“How dreadfully unkind you are,” murmured the young man.
“If you don’t like home-truths, you can go and amuse yourself anywhere you like,” she replied, in a severe tone, her hands folded inside her muff, and her coldest and most resolute expression on her face.
His heart sank into his boots. He walked on beside her, crestfallen and conquered.
“I was quite frank with Cocky beforehand, and I am quite frank with you. It is much the best way. There are no disappointments and no recriminations.”
Prince Woffram did not reply. He did not care to fill the rôle which had suited Cocky so admirably, and he was, moreover, blindly in love with her. Men in love do not like to be mere lay-figures. But he was weak by disposition, and both his poverty and passion made him weaker still.