“Spare me, good Queen,” I interrupted. “I must confess that I wrote that eulogy before I had seen your Majesty.” The queen frowned just a little. “Why need you have said that?” she asked. “Even an immortal queen is enough like her mortal sisters not to relish a stab at vanity. You men praise us women and then ruffle our hair by saying you didn’t mean it. Of course, we forgive you, but to forget is not so easy. Under the scar, the wound still aches.” Ever since then I have believed that a man should be arrested for exposing the naked truth. “In that book you also paid tender tribute to the babies, though I fail to see what they have to do with an old maid queen who achieved fame but not matrimony. Let us hope that tribute, at least, is sincere.” “No, only sentimental. I wrote that eulogy far from the maddening child, with naught but memory to lend wings to the imagination. I love to play with other people’s toddling darlings until there is a cry of distress from the interior department, in which case distance lends enchantment to the point of view. I have not always said nice things about babies, for, as I heard Methuselah say, there comes a time in the life of every man when he sighs for the power of Herod that he might order all children killed. Methuselah excepted his own; I don’t.” “That is cruel,” Her Serenity observed. “I crave Your Grace’s pardon,” I disagreed; “it is true: that is all.” “Truth never masquerades in the domino of drollity.” “Thy reproof, O Queen, is deserved. Would that I were Boswell to preserve in the amber of biography the gems which fall from the lips of a Doctress Johnson.” “Scribe, know you not that a woman would rather you praised her face than her mind, and her bonnet rather than her ‘blue stockings’? Why write what you don’t believe?” “Had my eyes been gladdened by the sight of your charms, fair Queen,” I boldly asserted, “I should have thrown off the fetters of prose and soared to the Mount of Parnassus, there to coronate you in verse with feet iambic.” “Perhaps the feet might limp—I mean they would, of course, be limpidly lyrical. But my poet laureate, don’t metrically measure My Majesty. Cork the rhythmic bottle and all shall be forgiven. And now you may tell me your mission.” “I’ve come to interview you,” I blurted out, instinctively putting my hand on my vest pocket, in which was a bottle of aromatic spirits of ammonia. But Her Grace has a spirit of her own and needed none of mine. There was no evidence of vertigo. “Don’t be alarmed,” I hastened to say. It was a needless assurance, but according to all precedent, I was expected to make the observation. “I wrote the interview before I came down here to see you, and it is now in type with a turn rule at the end for fear it should not measure up to expectations. This call is a mere matter of form.” “But how”—