Page:The City of Masks (1918).djvu/87

Rh He smiled. "Perfectly. You can never lose it, no matter how low you may sink."

"Well," she went on, hesitatingly, "suppose we forget it."

He eyed her for a moment in silence, shaking his head reflectively. "It is most astonishing," he said at last.

"What's astonishing?" she demanded sharply.

"I was merely thinking of your perfect, your exquisite French, madam!"

"French? Are you nutty? I've been talkin' to you in English all the time."

He nodded his head slowly. "Perhaps that is why your French is so astonishing," he said, and let it go at that.

"Look at me," she exclaimed, suddenly breaking into French as she spread out her thick arms and surveyed with disgust as much of her ample person as came within range of an obstructed vision, "just look at me. No one on earth would take me for a princess, would he? And yet that is just what I am. I think of myself as a princess, and always will, de Bosky. I think of myself,—of my most unlovely, unregal self,—as the superior of every other woman who treads the streets of New York, all of these base born women. I cannot help it. I cannot think of them as equals, not even the richest and the most arrogant of them. You say it is the blood, but you are wrong. Some of these women have a strain of royal blood in them—a far-off, remote strain, of course,—but they do not know it. That's the point, my friend. It is the knowing that makes us what we are. It isn't the blood itself. If we were