But then you know, dear, you would not have been content. Ah yes,
with your present experience--now you know that Queens as well as
little drudges have their troubles; but WITHOUT that experience?
You would have looked in the glass when you were alone; you would
have looked at your shapely hands and feet, and the shadows would
have crossed your pretty face. "Yes," you would have said to
yourself--"John is a dear, kind fellow, and I love him very much,
and all that, but--" and the old dreams, dreamt in the old low-
ceilinged kitchen before the dying fire, would have come back to
you, and you would have been discontented then as now, only in a
different way. Oh yes, you would, Cinderella, though you gravely
shake your gold-crowned head. And let me tell you why. It is
because you are a woman, and the fate of all us, men and women
alike, is to be for ever wanting what we have not, and to be
finding, when we have it, that it is not what we wanted. That is
the law of life, dear. Do you think as you lie upon the floor with
your head upon your arms, that you are the only woman whose tears
are soaking into the hearthrug at that moment? My dear Princess, if
you could creep unseen about your City, peeping at will through the
curtain-shielded windows, you would come to think that all the world
was little else than a big nursery full of crying children with none
to comfort them.
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