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."

"And they never will make me lord or prince, since I am not born such,"
answered Arnold. "If I were born such, I would make the title grand and
holy, so that men should see I was indeed prince and lord as well as man.
As it is, I feel myself greater than either, and born to rule higher
things. It would cramp me to put on a dignity for which I was not created.
Already I am cramped by the circumstances out of which I was born. I
cannot express strains of music that I hear in my highest dreams, because
my powers are weak,