and to everybody,” the Queen said, “a very weighty and indeed a sacred truth. I shall tell them that there is no gift more great than love.”

But the tall man who now stood before her shared in nothing in the exaltedness of her sentiments; and his dismay was apparent. “Alas, madame, you propose an enormity! for we are all so utterly the slaves of our catchwords that everybody would agree with you. There is no hope in ‘what anybody may say.’ Imbeciles everywhere will be saying that you have chosen wisely.”

Morvyth now sat peculiarly erect upon the ivory couch. “I am sure, I am really quite sure, Gonfal, that I do not understand you.”

“I mean, madame, that—while of course your offer is all that is most kind and generous,—that I must, here again, in mere honesty, I must distinguish. I mean 53that I think you know, as well as I do, love is not a gift which any man can give nor any person hope long to retain. Ah, no, madame! we shrug, we smilingly allow romanticists their catchwords: meanwhile it remains the veriest axiom, among realists like you and me, that love too is but a loan.”

53

“So you have come back,” the Queen remarked, with an approach to crossness, “to your eternal loans!”

He slightly flung out both hands, palms upward. “Love is that loan, my dear, which we accept most thankfully. But at the same time let us concede, as rational persons, the impermanence of all those materials which customarily provoke the erotic emotions.”

“Gonfal,” the young Queen said, “now you talk stupidly. You talk with a dangerous lack of something more important than discretion.”

“My love, I talk, again, as a widower.” Then for a while he said nothing: and it appeared to Morvyth that this incomprehensible ingrate had shivered. He said: “And still, still, I talk of mathematical certainties! For how can you hope to remain in anything a lovable object? In a score of years, or within at most two-score, you will have become either fat or wrinkled, your teeth will rot and tumble out, your eyes will blear; your thighs will be most unenticingly mottled, your breath will be unpleasant, and your breasts will have become flabby bags. All these impairments, I repeat, my dear, are mathematical certainties.”

54To such horrid and irrelevant nonsense the Queen replied, with dignity, “I am not your dear; and I simply wonder at your impudence in 

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