“There was a distinct suggestion of menace in your tone. But never mind. If you didn’t really mean it, we’ll pretend there wasn’t.—Well, my dears,” he went on, turning, so as to include the King in his audience, “you never will believe me, but it’s a solemn, sober fact that these two princesses were twin sisters, and that they looked so much alike that nobody, not even their own born mother, could tell them apart. Now, wasn’t that surprising? Only Ragglesnag looked like Gugglegoo suddenly curdled and gone sour, you know; and Gugglegoo looked like Ragglesnag suddenly wreathed out in smiles and graces. So that the courtiers used to say ’Hello! What can have happened? Here comes dear Princess Gugglegoo looking as black as thunder.’ Or else—’Bless us and save us! What’s this miracle? Here comes old Ragglesnag looking as if butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth,’ Well, and then....” “Oh, you needn’t continue,” the Queen interrupted, bridling. “You’re tedious and obvious, and utterly unfair and unjust. I hope I’m not an insipid little fool, like Gugglegoo; but I don’t think I’m quite a termagant, either, like your horrid exaggerated Ragglesnag.” “Oh, dear! Oh, dear!” wailed Florimond. “Why will people go and make a personal application or everything a fellow says? If I had been even remotely thinking of your Majesty, I should never have dreamed of calling her by either of those ridiculous outlandish names. Gugglegoo and Ragglesnag, indeed!” “What would you have called her?” the King asked, who was chuckling inscrutably in his armchair. “Well, I might have called her Ragglegoo, and I might have called her Gugglesnag. 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.