The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth

You may imagine the spreading consternation in this ordered world when it became known that the Princess who was affianced to the Prince, the Princess, Her Serene Highness! with royal blood in her veins! met,--frequently met,--the hypertrophied offspring of a common professor of chemistry, a creature of no rank, no position, no wealth, and talked to him as though there were no Kings and Princes, no order, no reverence--nothing but Giants and Pigmies in the world, talked to him and, it was only too certain, held him as her lover.

"If those newspaper fellows get hold of it!" gasped Sir Arthur Poodle Bootlick ...

"I am told--" whispered the old Bishop of Frumps.

"New story upstairs," said the first footman, as he nibbled among the dessert things. "So far as I can make out this here giant Princess--"

"They say--" said the lady who kept the stationer's shop by the main entrance to the Palace, where the little Americans get their tickets for the State Apartments ...

And then:

"We are authorised to deny--" said "Picaroon" in Gossip.

And so the whole trouble came out.

IV.

"They say that we must part," the Princess said to her lover.

"But why?" he cried. "What new folly have these people got into their heads?"

"Do you know," she asked, "that to love me--is high treason?"

"My dear," he cried; "but does it matter? What is their right--right without a shadow of reason--and their treason and their loyalty to us?" "You shall hear," she said, and told him of the things that had been told to her.

"It was the queerest little man who came to me with a soft, beautifully modulated voice, a softly moving little gentleman who sidled into the room like a cat and put his pretty white hand up so, whenever he had anything significant to say. He is bald, but not of course nakedly bald, and his nose and face are chubby rosy little things, and his beard is trimmed to a point in quite the loveliest way. He pretended to have emotions several times and made his eyes shine. You know he is quite a friend of the real royal family here, and he called me his dear young lady and was perfectly sympathetic even from the beginning. 'My dear young lady,' he said, 'you know--you mustn't,' several times, and then, 'You owe a duty.'"

"Where do they make such men?"

"He likes it," she said.

"But I don't see--"

"He told me serious things."

"You don't think," he said, turning on her abruptly, "that there's anything in the sort of thing he said?"

"There's something in it quite certainly," said she.

"You mean--?"

"I mean that without knowing it we have been trampling on the most sacred conceptions of the little folks. We who are royal are a class apart. We are worshipped prisoners, processional toys. We pay for worship by losing--our elementary freedom. And I was to have married that Prince--You know nothing of him though. Well, a pigmy Prince. He doesn't matter.... It seems it would have strengthened the bonds between my country and another. And this country also was to profit. Imagine it!--strengthening the bonds!"

"And now?"

"They want me to go on with it--as though there was nothing between us two."

"Nothing!"

"Yes. But that isn't all. He said--"

"Your specialist in Tact?"

"Yes. He said it would be better for you, better for all the giants, if we two--abstained from conversation. That was how he put it."

"But what can they do if we don't?"

"He said you might have your freedom."

"I!"

"He said, with a stress, 'My dear young lady, it would be better, it would be more dignified, if you parted, willingly.' That was all he said. With a stress on willingly."

"But--! What business is it of these little wretches, where we love, how we love? What have they and their world to do with us?"

"They do not think that."

"Of course," he said, "you disregard all this."

"It seems utterly foolish to me."

"That their laws should fetter us! That we, at the first spring of life, should be tripped by their old engagements, their aimless institutions I Oh--! We disregard it."

"I am yours. So far--yes."