"Ah!" she exclaimed at length in pleased surprise, "you have chanced upon my favourite of all the books in my uncle's library. How many tears have I shed for these poor lovers but chiefly because I knew no Romeo so brave and noble and handsome to tempt me to die for him, or so devoted as to die for me. That was when I was a child of ten, my lord. I have learned since that such love exists only in novels, and have ceased to cry for it."
"You are very cynical, sweet lady," he replied, "and unkind to the novelists, whom I hold in worshipful esteem."
"And I also esteem them. It is precisely because the life they tell of is so different from my own, in which nothing ever happens, that a book-cover is for me a magic door by whose opening I escape out of the unendurable present. Even more than the novels do I love the plays, and to see them acted is better than to read them, best of all it must be to act in one. Ah! that would indeed be like living another life."
"True, dear lady," he answered eagerly, "but there is a form of diversion which to my mind is the most fascinating of all, and that is the writing of a drama, for in so doing we create a little world of our own, and control the destinies of the men and women whom we bring into being."
She shrugged her shoulders. "But I care only to be the author of my own rôle."
"And what," he asked, "would you choose that rôle to be?"
"I would be a Princess beloved by the King of the greatest nation in the world. Beloved, mark you, not bargained for, but sought out personally by the King who should love me for myself alone, a manifestly impossible plot even for a play."
"On the contrary, 't is a good one. Let us collaborate now in the planning of such a scheme. Let us suppose that for political reasons the King could not come in his proper person, but having learned to love you from report, were to seek you out incognito. Let us also imagine him so happy as to win your love. Would you be capable of the devotion which you demand of him?"
"Would I wed such a King whom I had learned to love, though in disguise? Most certainly."
"Ah! dear lady, you wilfully disregard the point I make. Would you wed this true lover, not knowing that he was a King? Let me put it still more strongly. Would you give yourself to the _man_ you loved knowing that he was not of royal birth?"