“I am glad, then, I didn’t laugh.  And I am also glad I said nothing more.  I was feeling so little generous that if I had known something then of his mother’s allusion to ‘white geese’ I would have advised him to get one of them and lead it away on a beautiful blue ribbon.  Mrs. Blunt was wrong, you know, to be so scornful.  A white goose is exactly what her son wants.  But look how badly the world is arranged.  Such white birds cannot be got for nothing and he has not enough money even to buy a ribbon.  Who knows!  Maybe it was this which gave that tragic quality to his pose by the mantelpiece over there.  Yes, that was it.  Though no doubt I didn’t see it then.  As he didn’t offer to move after I had done speaking I became quite unaffectedly sorry and advised him very gently to dismiss me from his mind definitely.  He moved forward then and said to me in his usual voice and with his usual smile that it would have been excellent advice but unfortunately I was one of those women who can’t be dismissed at will.  And as I shook my head he insisted rather darkly:  ’Oh, yes, Dona Rita, it is so.  Cherish no illusions about that fact.’  It sounded so threatening that in my surprise I didn’t even acknowledge his parting bow.  He went out of that false situation like a wounded man retreating after a fight.  No, I have nothing to reproach myself with.  I did nothing.  I led him into nothing.  Whatever illusions have passed through my head I kept my distance, and he was so loyal to what he seemed to think the redeeming proprieties of the situation that he has gone from me for good without so much as kissing the tips of my fingers.  He must have felt like a man who had betrayed himself for nothing.  It’s horrible.  It’s the fault of that enormous fortune of mine, and I wish with all my heart that I could give it to him; for he couldn’t help his hatred of the thing that is:  and as to his love, which is just as real, well—­could I have rushed away from him to shut myself up in a convent?  Could I?  After all I have a right to my share of daylight.”

CHAPTER V

I took my eyes from her face and became aware that dusk was beginning to steal into the room.  How strange it seemed.  Except for the glazed rotunda part its long walls, divided into narrow panels separated by an order of flat pilasters, presented, depicted on a black background and in vivid colours, slender women with butterfly wings and lean youths with narrow birds’ wings.  The effect was supposed to be Pompeiian and Rita and I had often laughed at the delirious fancy of some enriched shopkeeper.  But still it was a display of fancy, a sign of grace; but at that moment these figures appeared to me weird and intrusive and strangely alive in their attenuated grace of unearthly beings concealing a power to see and hear.