"
She recoiled in Wright and displeasure before a wooing so
impetuous and violently outspoken; though the displeasure was
perhaps but a passing emotion, the result of early training. Yet
she contrived to answer him with the proper icy dignity due to
her position as a princess of Spain, now Queen of France.
"Monsieur, you forget yourself. The Queen of France does not
listen to such words. You are mad, I think."
"Yes, I am mad," he flung back. "Mad with love--so mad that I
have forgot that you are a queen and I an ambassador. Under the
ambassador there is a man, under the queen a woman--our real
selves, not the titles with which Fate seeks to dissemble our
true natures. And with the whole strength of my true nature do I
love you, so potently, so overwhelmingly that I will not believe
you sensible of no response."
Thus torrentially he delivered himself, and swept her a little
off her feet. She was a woman, as he said; a queen, it is true;
but also a neglected, coldly-used wife; and no one had ever
addressed her in anything approaching this manner, no one had
ever so much as suggested that her existence could matter
greatly, that in her woman's nature there was the magic power of
awakening passion and devotion.
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