It seemed to them that they sounded, and indeed they sounded, such hidden splendours in the very heart of things as none have ever reached before.

Even for mean and little souls, love is the revelation of splendours.

And these were giant lovers who had eaten the Food of the Gods ...
* * * * * You may imagine the spreading consternation in this ordered world when it became known that the Princess who was affianced to the Prince, the Princess, Her Serene Highness! with royal blood in her veins! met,--frequently met,--the hypertrophied offspring of a common professor of chemistry, a creature of no rank, no position, no wealth, and talked to him as though there were no Kings and Princes, no order, no reverence--nothing but Giants and Pigmies in the world, talked to him and, it was only too certain, held him as her lover.
"If those newspaper fellows get hold of it!" gasped Sir Arthur Poodle Bootlick ...
"I am told--" whispered the old Bishop of Frumps.
"New story upstairs," said the first footman, as he nibbled among the dessert things.

"So far as I can make out this here giant Princess--" "They say--" said the lady who kept the stationer's shop by the main entrance to the Palace, where the little Americans get their tickets for the State Apartments ...
And then: "We are authorised to deny--" said "Picaroon" in _Gossip_.
And so the whole trouble came out.
IV.
"They say that we must part," the Princess said to her lover.
"But why ?" he cried.

"What new folly have these people got into their heads ?" "Do you know," she asked, "that to love me--is high treason ?" "My dear," he cried; "but does it matter?
What is their right--right without a shadow of reason--and their treason and their loyalty to us ?" "You shall hear," she said, and told him of the things that had been told to her.
"It was the queerest little man who came to me with a soft, beautifully modulated voice, a softly moving little gentleman who sidled into the room like a cat and put his pretty white hand up so, whenever he had anything significant to say.