"That damned Condé says he's a lay Jesuit," Henry grumbled. "But what am I? A lay figure. I suppose you wouldn't like me to sleep in a kennel in the back yard?" he asked. "Another thing I can't understand is why on earth you had to be an American, Jimmy."
Monkley told Henry of his sudden impulse to be an American at the Emperor's reception.
"Never give way to impulse," Henry said. "You're not a bit like an American. You'll get a nasty growth in your nose or strain it or something. Americans may talk through the nose a bit; but you make a noise like a cat that's had its tail shut in a door. It's like living in a Punch and Judy show. It may not damage your nose, but it's very bad for my ears, old man. It's all very fine for me to be a French servant. I can speak French; though I don't look like the servant part of it. But you can't speak American, and if you go on trying much harder you very soon won't be able to speak any language at all. I noticed to-day, when you started talking to the furniture fellow, he looked very uneasy. I think he thought he was sitting on a concertina."
"Anyway, he cleared off without getting this month's instalment," Monkley said.
"Oh, it's a very good voice to have when there are duns kicking around," Henry said. "Or in a crowded railway carriage. But as a voice to live with, it's rotten. However, don't listen to me. My advice doesn't count nowadays. Only," and Henry paused impressively, "when people advise you to try linseed oil for your boots as soon as you start talking to them, then don't say I didn't warn you."
Notwithstanding Henry's pessimism, Monkley continued to practise his American; day by day the task of imposing Sylvia on the world as the King of Spain and France was being carefully prepared, too carefully, it seemed to Sylvia, for so much talk beforehand was becoming tiresome. The long delay was chiefly due to Henry's inability to keep in his head the numerous genealogical facts that were crammed down his throat by the Prince de Condé.
"I never was any good at history even when I was a boy," Henry protested. "Never. And I was never good at working out cousins and aunts. I know I had two aunts, and hated them both."
At last Henry's facts were considered firmly enough implanted to justify a move; and in September the prince and Monkley sat down to compose their preliminary letter to Sir Francis Hurndale. Sylvia by now was so much accustomed to the behavior of her companions that she never thought seriously about the fantastic side of the affair. Her own masquerade as a boy had been passed off so successfully even upon such an acute observer as Jimmy, until her father had let out the secret by a slip of the tongue, that she had no qualms about being accepted as a king. She realized that money was to be made out of it; but the absence of money had already come to seem a temporary discomfort, to relieve which people in a position like her own and her father's had no reason to be scrupulous. Not that she really ever bothered her head with the morality of financial ways and means. When she spent the ten-franc piece that she thought she had found, the wrong had lain in unwittingly depriving her mother whom she loved; if she had not loved her mother she might have still had scruples about stealing from her; but stealing from people who had plenty of money and with whom there was no binding link of affection would have been quite incomprehensible to her. Therefore the sight of Jimmy Monkley and her father and the Prince de Condé sitting round a spindle-legged tea-table in this new house that smelled pleasantly of varnish was merely something in a day's work of the life they were leading, like a game of cards. It was a much jollier life than any she had yet known; her alliance with Jimmy had been a very good move; her father was treated as he ought to be treated by being kept under; she was shortly going to have some more clothes.