His meditation was interrupted by a most awkward incident. In the excitement of the bestowal of gifts by the Human Beings, and in the confusion of the entrance of the thirteenth and uninvited Human Being, one of them all had been forgotten and had got himself shuffled well at the back of everyone. And now he came pressing forward in great embarrassment, to bring his gift. It was the day labourer, and several of the Human Beings drew hastily back as he approached the dais. But everyone fell still farther back in consternation when it was seen what he had brought. For on the delicate cobweb coverlet of the little princess’s bed, he cast a spadeful of earth.
“It’s all I’ve got,” the man said, “or I’d brought a better.”
The earth all but covered the little bed of the princess, and it was necessary to lift her from it, which the fairy queen did with her own hands, flashing a reproachful glance at her husband, the king. But when the party had trooped away for the dancing,—with the orchestra playing the way a Summer night would sound if it were to steep itself in music, so that it could only be heard and not seen,—then the king came quietly back to the christening chamber and ordered the spadeful of earth to be gathered up and put in a certain part of the palace garden.
And so (the Human Beings having gone home at once and forgotten that they had been present), when the music lessened to silence and the fairies stole from note to note and at last drifted away as invisibly as the hours leave a dial, they passed, in the palace garden, a great corner of the rich black earth which the day labourer had brought to the princess. And it was ready for seed sowing.
The Princess Romancia grew with the days and the years, and from the first it was easily to be seen that certainly she seemed different from everyone in the world. As a baby she began talking in her cradle without having been taught—not very plainly, to be sure, or so that anybody in particular excepting the fairy queen understood her—but still she talked. As a little girl she seemed always to be listening to things as if she understood them as well as she did people, or better. When she grew older, nobody knew quite how she differed, but everybody agreed that she seemed different. And this the princess knew better than anybody, and most of the time it made her hurt all over.
When the fairies played at thistle-down ball, the princess often played too, but she never felt really like one of them all. She felt that they were obliged to have her play with them because she was the princess, and not because they wanted her. When they played at hide-and-go-seek in a flower bed, somehow the others always hid together in the big flowers, and the princess hid alone in a tulip or a poppy. And whenever they whispered among themselves, she always fancied that they were whispering of her. She imagined herself often looked at with a smile or a shrug; she began to believe that she was not wanted but only endured because she was the princess, and she was certain that no one liked her for herself alone, because she was somehow so different. Little by little she grew silent, and refused to join in the games, and sat apart alone. Presently she began to give blunt answers and to take exception and even to disagree. And, of course, little by little the court began secretly to dislike her, and to cease to try to understand her, and they told one another that she was hopelessly different and that that was all that there was to be said about her.
Little by little she grew silent and refused to join in the games.
But in spite of all this, the Princess Romancia was very beautiful, and the fame of her beauty went over the whole of fairyland. When enough years had gone by, fairy princes from this and that dominion began to come to the king’s palace to see her. But though they all admired the princess’s great beauty, many were of course repelled by her sharp answers and her constant suspicions.