Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/49

 you alternately—or, at least, to give you to understand as much—three or four times a day. It is winter midnight or summer noon, a climate of extremes.

"Do you like the smell of tangerine-skin?"

Every evening for a week, when, at the end of dinner, the fruit was handed round, the King asked her that question; and she, never suspecting his malice, answered invariably, as she crushed a bit between her fingers, and fervidly inhaled its odour, "Oh, do I like it? I adore it. It's perfect rapture."

She is hasty, she is uncertain, she is intense. Will you be surprised when I go on to insist that, down deep, she is altogether well-meaning and excessively tender-hearted, and when I own that among all the women I know I can think of none other who seems to me so attractive, so fascinating, so sweetly feminine and loveable? (Oh, no, I am not in love with her, not in the least—though I don't say that I mightn't be, if I were a king, or she were not a queen.) If she realises that she has been unreasonable, she is the first to confess it; she repents honestly, and makes the devoutest resolutions to amend. If she discovers that she has hurt anybody's feelings, her conscience will not give her a single second of peace, until she has sought her victim out and heaped him with benefits. If she believes that this or that distasteful task forms in very truth a part of her duty, she will go to any length of persevering self-sacrifice to accomplish it. She has a hundred generous and kindly impulses, where she has one that is perverse or inconsiderate. Bring any case of distress or sorrow to her notice, and see how instantly her eyes soften, how eager she is to be of help. And in her affections, however mercurial she may appear on the surface, she is really constant, passionate, and, in great things, forbearing. She and her husband, for example, though