Page:The City of Masks (1918).djvu/88

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
76
THE CITY OF MASKS

deprived of the power to think, we could have the blood of every royal family in Europe in our veins, and that is all the good it would do us. We think we are nobler, better than all the rest of creation, and we would keep on thinking it if we slept in the gutter and begged for a crust of bread. And the proof of all this is to be found in the fact that the rest of creation will not allow us to forget. They think as we do, in spite of themselves, and there you have the secret of the supremacy we feel, in spite of everything."

Her brilliant, black eyes were flashing with something more than excitement. The joy, the realization of power glowed in their depths, welling up from fires that would never die. Waldemar de Bosky nodded his head in the most matter-of-fact way. He was not enthralled. All this was very simple and quite undebatable to him.

"I take it, therefore, that you retract all that you said about its being poppycock," he said, turning up his coat collar and fastening it close to his throat with a long and formidable looking safety pin.

"It may be poppycock," she said, "but we can't help liking it—not to save our lives."

"And I shall not have to kill you as if you were a snake, eh?"

"Not on your life," said Mrs. Moses Jacobs in English, opening the door for him.

He passed out into the cold and windy street and she went back to her dingy nook at the end of the store, pausing on the way to inform an assistant that she was not to be disturbed, no matter who came in to see her.

While she sat behind her glittering show-case and