generous nor high minded; it was positively frantic.  He got up and went away to lean against the mantelpiece, there, on his elbow and with his head in his hand.  You have no idea of the charm and the distinction of his pose.  I couldn’t help admiring him:  the expression, the grace, the fatal suggestion of his immobility.  Oh, yes, I am sensible to aesthetic impressions, I have been educated to believe that there is a soul in them.”

With that enigmatic, under the eyebrows glance fixed on me she laughed her deep contralto laugh without mirth but also without irony, and profoundly moving by the mere purity of the sound.

“I suspect he was never so disgusted and appalled in his life.  His self-command is the most admirable worldly thing I have ever seen.  What made it beautiful was that one could feel in it a tragic suggestion as in a great work of art.”

She paused with an inscrutable smile that a great painter might have put on the face of some symbolic figure for the speculation and wonder of many generations.  I said: 

“I always thought that love for you could work great wonders.  And now I am certain.”

“Are you trying to be ironic?” she said sadly and very much as a child might have spoken.

“I don’t know,” I answered in a tone of the same simplicity.  “I find it very difficult to be generous.”

“I, too,” she said with a sort of funny eagerness.  “I didn’t treat him very generously.  Only I didn’t say much more.  I found I didn’t care what I said—­and it would have been like throwing insults at a beautiful composition.  He was well inspired not to move.  It has spared him some disagreeable truths and perhaps I would even have said more than the truth.  I am not fair.  I am no more fair than other people.  I would have been harsh.  My very admiration was making me more angry.  It’s ridiculous to say of a man got up in correct tailor clothes, but there was a funereal grace in his attitude so that he might have been reproduced in marble on a monument to some woman in one of those atrocious Campo Santos:  the bourgeois conception of an aristocratic mourning lover.  When I came to that conclusion I became glad that I was angry or else I would have laughed right out before him.”

“I have heard a woman say once, a woman of the people—­do you hear me, Dona Rita?—­therefore deserving your attention, that one should never laugh at love.”

“My dear,” she said gently, “I have been taught to laugh at most things by a man who never laughed himself; but it’s true that he never spoke of love to me, love as a subject that is.  So perhaps . . .  But why?”

“Because (but maybe that old woman was crazy), because, she said, there was death in the mockery of love.”

Dona Rita moved slightly her beautiful shoulders and went on: