"Look at me," she exclaimed, suddenly breaking into French as she spread out her thick arms and surveyed with disgust as much of her ample person as came within range of an obstructed vision, "just look at me. No one on earth would take _me_ for a princess, would he? And yet that is just what I am. I _think_ of myself as a princess, and always will, de Bosky. I think of myself,--of my most unlovely, unregal self,--as the superior of every other woman who treads the streets of New York, all of these base born women. I cannot help it. I cannot think of them as equals, not even the richest and the most arrogant of them. You say it is the blood, but you are wrong. Some of these women have a strain of royal blood in them--a far-off, remote strain, of course,--but they do not _know_ it. That's the point, my friend. It is the _knowing_ that makes us what we are. It isn't the blood itself. If we were deprived of the power to _think_, we could have the blood of every royal family in Europe in our veins, and that is all the good it would do us. We _think_ we are nobler, better than all the rest of creation, and we would keep on thinking it if we slept in the gutter and begged for a crust of bread. And the proof of all this is to be found in the fact that the rest of creation will not allow us to forget. They think as we do, in spite of themselves, and there you have the secret of the supremacy we feel, in spite of everything." Her brilliant, black eyes were flashing with something more than excitement. The joy, the realization of power glowed in their depths, welling up from fires that would never die. Waldemar de Bosky nodded his head in the most matter-of-fact way. He was not enthralled. All this was very simple and quite undebatable to him. "I take it, therefore, that you retract all that you said about its being poppycock," he said, turning up his coat collar and fastening it close to his throat with a long and formidable looking safety pin. "It may be poppycock," she said, "but we can't help liking it--not to save our lives." "And I shall not have to kill you as if you were a snake, eh?" "Not on your life," said Mrs. Moses Jacobs in English, opening the door for him. He passed out into the cold and windy street and she went back to her dingy nook at the end of the store, pausing on the way to inform an assistant that she was not to be disturbed, no matter who came in to see her.