"Never," said Olivia, "never. Shall you?"
That was exceptionally easy to make clear, and thereafter he
whimsically remembered something else:
"You live in the king's palace now," he reminded her, "and this is
another palace where you might live if you chose. And you might be a
queen, with drawing-rooms and a poet laureate and all the rest. And
in New York--in New York, perhaps we shall live in a flat."
"No," she cried, "no, indeed! Not 'perhaps,' I _insist_ upon a
flat." She looked about the room with its bench brought from the
altar of a forgotten deity of dreams, with its line and colour
dissolving to mirrored point and light--the mystic union of sight
with dream--and she smiled at the divine incongruity and the divine
resemblance. "It wouldn't be so very different--a flat," she said
shyly.
Wouldn't it--wouldn't it, after all, be so very different?
"Ah, if you only think so, really," cried St. George.
"But it will be different, just different enough to like better,"
she admitted then.
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