"You are as blind as Homer," said his friend. "Can't you see that her love is purely personal? Would she care to give a title to a pianist, if he were any other than Arnold Wulff? If you had other eyes in your head, or if there were another man inside even that same face of yours, the strains might flow out under your fingers like streams from Paradise, in vain, so far as her heart was concerned. Your voice is quite as persuasive as your music, with her." "If so, why must she put a title in front of my name, before I am worthy of her?" asked Arnold. "She offers me some square miles of uninhabitable forest, because, as owner of them, I can wear a Von before my name. I can put it on as an actor on the stage wears a chapeau of the Quatorze time. It is one of the properties of the establishment. You may call it a livery of the palace, if you please. I may make love to her on the stage as 'My Lord.' But my own little meagre part of Arnold,--thank you, I prefer it, without my princess." "And yet, if you have the palace, a princess is necessary. With your love of harmony, you yourself would not be pleased to see a cotton dress hanging across a damask couch, or rude manners interrupt a stately dinner. The sound of the titles clangs well as you are ushered up through the redoubled apartments. If the play is in the Quatorze time, let it be played out. A princess deserves at least a lord for a husband." "Very well, if the question is of marriage," answered Arnold; "but in love, a woman loves a man, not a title; and if a woman marries as she loves, she marries the man, not the lordship." "But this is a true princess," said his friend Carl. "And a true princess," answered Arnold, "feels the peas under ever so many mattresses. She would not fall in love with a false lord, or degrade herself by marrying her scullion. But if she is a true princess, she sees what is lordly in her subject. If she loves him, already he is above her in station,--she looks up to him as her ideal. Whatever we love is above self. We pay unconscious homage to the object of our love. Already it becomes our lord or princess." "I don't see, then," said Carl, "but that you are putting unnecessary peas in your shoes. It is this princeliness that your princess has discovered in you; and the titles she would give you are the signs of it, that she wishes you to wear before the world."