“Would you have been proud of me?” asked Marcel.
“Yes,... perhaps.”
“You would not have cared a straw, I believe,” he said, angry and hurt at her indifferent tone.
“If you had been killed? Indeed I should, Marcel. I should have been very sorry; but what is the good of being sorry now, when it is never going to happen? Look at that ship out there! With what a dip she shears the water! How fast she goes! Her sails are like wings. I wish I had wings!”
“You are always wishing for impossible things,” said Marcel, huffed at this summary dismissal; “you were wishing you were a man a little while ago, and now you want to be a bird. Why don’t you wish for something I could give you?”
“You give me! You could not give me any one of the things I wish for!” Alba flung back the waves of swart hair from her low, broad brow and laughed derisively.
“How do you know that? I have plenty of money, and money can buy everything—everything reasonable, that is. Suppose a fairy were to come and say she would give you whatever you wished; what would you ask for?”
“I would ask her first to make me perfectly beautiful, perfectly good, and perfectly happy,” began Alba.
“Why, you are all that already, you foolish girl!”
“You think so; but you know nothing about it. I would ask her to make me as rich and powerful as a queen, and to make everybody pay me homage—not because I was rich and powerful, but because they loved me! Oh! I should like to be loved more than anybody ever was in this world before. And I should like to live in a beautiful castle, like the castle yonder, and I should fill it with beautiful things, and make it a real fairy palace to live in.”