“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, and fail me as often the strings of my instrument fail my fingers.  To put on any of the conventionalities of life, any of its honors, even the loves of life, would be to put on so many constraints the more.”

“That is because you have never loved,” said Carl.

“That may be,” said Arnold,—­“because I have never loved anything but music.  Still that does not satisfy me,—­it scarcely gives me joy; it gives me only longing, and oftener despair.  I listen to it alone, in secret, until I am driven by a strange desire to express it to a great world.  Then, for a few moments, the praise and flattery of crowds delight and exalt me,—­but only to let me fall back into greater despair, into remorse that I have allowed the glorious art of music to serve me as a cup of self-exaltation.”

“You, Arnold, so unmoved by applause?” said Carl.

“It is only an outside coldness,” answered Arnold; “the applause heats me, excites me, till a moment when I grow to hate it.  The flatteries of a princess and her imitating train turn my head, till an old choral strain, or a clutch that my good angel gives me, a welling-up of my own genius in my heart, comes to draw me back, to cool me, to taunt me as traitor, to rend me with the thought that in self I have utterly forgotten myself, my highest self.”