Page:The Yellow Book - 07.djvu/52

 called her Gugglesnam. But I hope I'm much too discerning ever to have applied such a sweeping generalisation to her as Ragglesnag, or such a silly, sugary sort of barbarism as Gugglegoo."

"It's perfectly useless," the Queen broke out, bitterly, "to expect a man—even a comparatively intelligent and highly-developed man, like Florimond—to understand the subtleties of a woman's nature, or to sympathise with the difficulties of her life. When she isn't as crude, and as blunt, and as phlegmatic, and as insensitive, and as transparent and commonplace and all-of-one-piece, as themselves, men always think a woman's unreasonable and capricious and infantile. It's a little too discouraging. Here I wear myself to a shadow, and bore and worry myself to extermination, with all the petty contemptible cares and bothers and pomps and ceremonies of this tiresome little Court; and that's all the thanks I get—to be laughed at by my husband, and lectured and ridiculed in stupid allegories by Florimond! It's a little too hard. Oh, if you'd only let me go away, and leave it all behind me! I'd go to Paris, and change my name, and become a concert-singer. It's the only thing I really care for—to sing and sing and sing. Oh, if I could only go and make a career, as a concert-singer in Paris! "Will you let me?" Will you? Will you?" she demanded vehemently of her husband.

"That's rather a radical measure to bring up for discussion at this hour of the night, isn't it?" the King suggested, laughing.

"But it's quite serious enough for you to afford to consider it. And I don't see why one hour isn't as good as another. Will you let me go to Paris and become a concert-singer?"

"What! And leave poor me alone and forlorn here in Vescova? Oh, my dear, you wouldn't desert your own lawful spouse in that regardless manner!"

"I don't