"It's too big for the cottage," wept the Empress. "No, it must be left for the Londoners to hear; they'll listen to 'em, Perry—to all our tunes. They'll hear 'em sitting where we sit now—'What's the Odds as Long as we're Young?' and 'I Didn't Go for to Cheese my Pal,' and 'My Old Dutch,' and all the rest of 'em! And we shall be sitting, you and me, and nothing but silence for us to hear!"
The poor lady became epic. She beat her hands in her emblazoned lap, and her features seemed to disappear behind her expression as the features in an agonised face sometimes do.
"It's only for six days," faltered the Emperor, almost overwhelmed by the realisation of what was before them.
"It'll seem six years—it'll seem a lifetime! And the size of the cottage, too! Why, it was only made to hold a fisherman!"
This argument was so unanswerable that the Emperor could only say:
"My dear, the house in Camberwell was small."
"And so was we when we lived there," retorted the Empress. "But we're a bit bigger now, I hope."
Who could stand up against such merciless logic? Not the Emperor, certainly. He began to feel as if they would have to spend their week in the fishing-cottage crouching upon all-fours, in attitudes formed to attract the cramp. And meanwhile that pernicious race, "the Londoners," as the Empress always called them in the voice of one alluding to the Hairy Ainu, or any other peculiarly savage tribe—the Londoners would be couching in the partially baronial hall, wandering through the vistas of boudoirs, reading in the libraries, listening to the light conversation of the parrots in the winter gardens, dining among the stags' heads in the cedar-wood parlour, possibly even dancing, or dicing, or following some other cannibal custom in the purple drawing-room. All these ideas, thronging upon him in a grisly crowd, so weighed upon the Emperor's spirit that he let his head drop on his breast, and allowed to escape from him this awful sentence of self-condemnation:
"I do believe I've been a fool!"