Page:T.M. Royal Highness.djvu/270

254 decline the pleasure of your distinguished company once and for all."

He dropped his head, and they rode a while in silence. "Won't you go on to tell me how the Countess came to you?" he asked at last.

"No, I won't," she said, and looked straight in front of her. But he pressed her so pleadingly that she finished her story and said: "And although fifty other companions applied, my choice—for the choice rested with me—fell at once on her, I was so much taken with her at my first interview. She was odd, I could see that: but she was odd only from too rich an experience of misery and wickedness, that was clear in every word she said; and as for me, I had always been a little lonely and cut off, and absolutely without experience, Except what I got at my University lectures."

"Of course, you had always been a little lonely and cut off!" repeated Klaus Heinrich, with a ring of joy in his voice.

"That's what I said. It was a dull, simple life in some ways that I led, and still lead, because it has not altered much, and is all much the same. There were parties with 'lions' and balls, and often a dash in a closed motor to the Opera House, where I sat in one of the little boxes above the stalls, so as to be well observed by everybody, for show, as we say. That was a necessary part of my position."

"For show?"

"Yes, for show; I mean the duty of showing oneself off, of not raising walls against the public, but letting them come into the garden and walk on the lawn and gaze at the terrace, watching us at tea. My father, Mr. Spoelmann, disliked it intensely. But it was a necessary consequence of our position."

"What did you usually do besides, Miss Spoelmann?"

"In the spring we went to our house in the Adirondacks and in the summer to our house at Newport-on-Sea. There