With regard to Gianluca, Veronica was indeed curious, but she was also somewhat sceptical.  She could not, of course, say surely that a young man might not die of love for a girl whom he scarcely knew; and among the acquaintances of her family she remembered at least one case in converse, where a morbid maiden of eighteen years had died because she was not allowed to marry the man she loved.  Even there, it had been hinted that the girl had caught a bad cold which had fastened upon her delicate lungs.  It was doubtless a romantic story, and if anything appealed to her for Gianluca, it was the romance in his case.  Her reading had been very limited as yet, and the book she was reading so eagerly was a French translation of the Bride of Lammermoor.  The romance of it spoke directly to her imagination; but when the book was closed she did not believe that she had a romantic disposition.  It is an indisputable fact that the people to whom the strangest things happen never regard themselves as romantic characters, whatever others may think of them.  They are, indeed, more often active and daring people, to whom what others think extraordinary seems quite natural and easy.  They make the events out of which humanity’s appetite for romance is fed, and become, to humanity, themselves the unconscious embodiments of romance itself.  In her heart, therefore, Veronica was a little sceptical about the reality of the terrific passion by which, according to Taquisara, his friend was consumed.  She recalled his face distinctly, as she had seen him half a dozen times in the world, and she thought the definition of him which she had given Bianca Corleone a very just one.  He reminded her of one of Perugino’s angels—­with a youthful beard.  If angels had beards, she thought, without a smile, they would have beards like Gianluca della Spina’s, very youthful, scanty, curling, and so fair as to be almost colourless.

She remembered that he had looked at her rather sadly, and had spoken little and to no purpose, making futile remarks about juvenile amusements, and one or two harmless little jokes which she had quite forgotten, but to which he had referred at the next short meeting, at some other house, on the corner of some other similar sofa.  That was all that she could call up out of her memories.  She had thought him insipid.  Once she remembered distinctly that while he had been talking to her, she had been watching Bianca Corleone’s handsome brother, Gianforte, whom she had seen only once before, and that when her companion had asked her to agree with him, she had said ‘yes,’ without having the least idea of what he had been saying.  He had produced only a very slight and transparent shadow amongst the figures of her recollections.  It was a severe tax on her credulity to try and believe that he was dying for love of her.  If it were true, she thought, why had he not had the courage to make her understand it?  The fact that the offer made by his family had not been communicated to her