“But I should insist that all this is romance. You are a heroine, and if I am not a hero, I am playing leading man just now, which has great possibilities. We are being hurled through space at a speed of sixty miles an hour. By and by a dark-skinned person will loom at the door and say that dinner is ready in the dining car, and you will let me open all the doors for you to the third coach ahead; and we will eat, drink, and be merry at the parting of the ways, and you will twit me for my New York accent in the most musical dialect that ever was invented by the Anglo-Saxon race. Yet I do not know your name, and you do not know mine. We are two detached fragments of human society appositely placed in a Pullman section, impelled by the social instinct and chaperoned by a corporation. All the elements are modern. Can not you see the very essence of romance in the situation?” “On the contrary it appears to me as quite realistic. It all might happen any day. I shall go on happening to some one, and you to someone else, every day.” “I see; it is realism because it will not end anywhere in particular.” “Will you listen to a fable?” she demanded suddenly. “Is it a little thing of your own? Of course I shall listen.” “Once there was a princess—” “Dear me!” I cried. “I’m sorry for that. Doesn’t a story that begins with a heroine instead of with a hero always end sadly?” “This is a fable,” she said. “It was a long time ago, when the heroine _could_ be named Maud, though this heroine was not. Well, the princess fell in love with a prince.” “Do you mean _first_?” I asked. “I know what you will say,” she continued, not heeding my interruption. “She should not have loved the prince. She should have loved some romantically impossible person. Anyway, she loved the prince; and more absurd still, the prince loved the princess. You can see how much more artistic it would have been for the prince to have been indifferent. He might at least have had the artistic decency to love the other princess—or to think that he did, which would have done for a while; but he was a nice prince, and he loved the princess. At least, you will say, there should be a parental obstacle, an old fool of a king with other plans. Or it might be an ill-tempered queen with a bad complexion. She would have been useful in a good many ways. But, no; not a single relative opposed either the prince or the princess.” “Then what on earth did they do?” I asked.