"I say," he asked in an undertone, "the stork doesn't light around here,
does he?"
"Not if they see him first!" I replied grimly, and he went out.
CHAPTER XIII
THE PRINCE--PRINCIPALLY
It was all well enough for me to say--as I had to to Tillie many a
time--that it was ridiculous to make a fuss over a person for what,
after all, was an accident of birth. It was well enough for me to say
that it was only by chance that I wasn't strutting about with a crown on
my head and a man blowing a trumpet to let folks know I was coming, and
by the same token and the same chance Prince Oskar might have been a
red-haired spring-house girl, breaking the steels in her figure stooping
over to ladle mineral water out of a hole in the earth.
Nevertheless, at five o'clock, after every one had gone, when I saw Miss
Patty, muffled in furs, tripping out through the snow, with a tall thin
man beside her, walking very straight and taking one step to her four, I
felt as though somebody had hit me at the end of my breast-bone.
They stopped a minute outside before they came in, and I had to take
myself in hand.
"Now look here, Minnie, you idiot," I said to myself, "this is America;
you're as good as he is; not a bend of the knee or a stoop of the neck.
And if he calls you 'my good girl' hit him."
They came in together, laughing and talking, and, to be honest, if I
hadn't caught the back of a chair, I'd have had one foot back of the
other and been making a courtesy in spite of myself.
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