To be twenty and to be leaning in
this palace window wearing a pale blue dinner-gown manifestly
suggested a completion of the picture; and all that evening it had
been impressing her as inappropriate that the maiden and the castle
tower and the very sea itself should all be present, with no
possibility of any knight within an altitude of many hundred feet.
"The dear little ponies' heads!" Mrs. Hastings had kept saying.
"What a poetic game chess is, Mr. Frothingham, don't you think?
That's what I always said to poor dear Mr. Hastings--at least,
that's what he always said to me: 'Most games are so _needless_, but
chess is really up and down poetic'"
Mr. Frothingham made all ready to speak and then gave it up in
silence.
"Um," he had responded liberally.
"I'm sure," Mrs. Hastings had continued plaintively, "neither he nor
I ever thought that I would be playing chess up on top of a volcano
in the middle of the ocean. It's this awful feeling," Mrs. Hastings
had cried querulously, "of being neither on earth nor under the
water nor in Heaven that I object to.
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