Part 30 (1/2)
”Oh, can't you see? Supposing he comes and does look at me; and then goes away without--without caring!--That's what you are asking me to put up with. For me to know, and for him to know, and for him to know that I know! How would you like it yourself?”
”I tell her she is very ridiculous,” said the Queen. ”A Princess can't marry a mushroom. Does she want to fall in love with her eyes shut.
Something has to be done beforehand, or we should never be anywhere----”
”I don't want to be anywhere,” said the Princess.
”Outside a lunatic asylum,” said her mother, completing the sentence.
”My dear child,” put in the King, ”don't you see that nothing is really settled--and will not be until you agree to it?”
”Then why did you ever tell him anything about it? Why couldn't we have just met? It's this picking of us out beforehand behind our backs, and then telling us of it; that's what I can't stand!”
”My dear, n.o.body is forcing you,” repeated the King persuasively.
”Then I won't see him.”
”I tell her she must,” remarked the Queen in a tone of comfortable finality.
”Mamma, will you stop knitting!” cried Charlotte. ”You treat me as if I were an insect!”
”You have got the brains of one,” retorted her mother. ”John, will you please speak to her? Perhaps you can understand what it all means; I can't. She has been talking Greek to me--something or other about the Trojans.”
”Yes; the Trojan women,” corrected Charlotte.
”She says she's like one of them!”
”So I am.”
”I don't know which one, you mentioned so many.”
”All of them. Yes, papa, they had to go and live with foreigners--men they had never seen.”
”Don't say 'live with'; it's an objectionable term.”
”Die with them, then: some did! One of them killed a king in his bath; at least his wife did, but it's all the same.”
”Yes; she began quoting some verses to me about that bath affair,” said the Queen. ”And I must say they didn't sound to me quite decent.”
Charlotte was quite ready to repeat it.
”Oh, don't quote poetry to me!” begged the King. ”I don't understand it.”
”And I try not to,” said the Queen. So Charlotte's quotation was ruled out of the discussion.
”Don't you think, my dear,” persuaded her father, ”that meeting him here, as it just so happens, will seem sufficiently accidental?”
”Not after we've waited for him all this time; not after I climbed up that spire and threw my cap at him without knowing it,” said the Princess. ”Oh, you don't know what that paper has been saying!” And she pointed to the bits.
The King stooped and began gathering them up.