“You are seventeen,” said Marcello firmly.

“I shall be eighteen on my next birthday!” retorted Aurora with warmth.  “Then we shall see who is the more grown up.  I shall be in society, and you—­why, you will not even be out of the University.”

She said this with the contempt which Marcello’s extreme youth deserved.

“I am not going to the University.”

“Then you will be a boy all your life.  I always tell you so.  Unless you do what other people do, you will never grow up at all.  You ought to be among men by this time, instead of everlastingly at home, clinging to your mother’s skirts!”

A bright flush rose in Marcello’s cheeks.  He felt that he wanted to box her ears, and for an instant he wished himself small again that he might do it, though he remembered what a terrible fighter Aurora had been when she was a little girl, and had preserved a vivid recollection of her well-aimed slaps.

“Don’t talk about my mother in that way,” he said angrily.

“I’m not talking of her at all.  She is a saint, and I love her very much.  But that is no reason why you should always be with her, as if you were a girl!  I don’t suppose you mean to begin life as a saint yourself, do you?  You are rather young for that, you know.”

“No,” Marcello answered, feeling that he was not saying just the right thing, but not knowing what to say.  “And I am sure my mother does not expect it of me, either,” he added.  “But that is no reason why you should be so disagreeable.”

He felt that he had been weak, and that he ought to say something sharp.  He knew very well that his mother believed it quite possible for a boy to develop into saintship without passing through the intermediate state of sinning manhood; and though his nature told him that he was not of the temper that attains sanctity all at once, he felt that he owed to his mother’s hopes for him a sort of loyalty in which Aurora had made him fail.  The reasonings of innocent sentiment are more tortuous than the wiles of the devil himself, and have amazing power to torment the unfledged conscience of a boy brought up like Marcello.

Aurora’s way of thinking was much more direct.

“If you think I am disagreeable, you can go away,” she said, with a scornful laugh.

“Thank you.  You are very kind.”  He tried to speak sarcastically, but it was a decided failure.

To his surprise, Aurora turned and looked at him very quietly.

“I wonder whether I shall like you, when you are a man,” she said in a tone of profound reflection.  “I am rather ashamed of liking you now, because you are such a baby.”

He flushed again, very angry this time, and he moved away to leave her, without another word.

She turned her face to the storm and took no notice of him.  She thought that he would come back, but there was just the least doubt about it, which introduced an element of chance and was perfectly delightful while it lasted.  Was there ever a woman, since the world began, who did not know that sensation, either by experience or by wishing she might try it?  What pleasure would there be in angling if the fish did not try to get off the hook, but stupidly swallowed it, fly and all?  It might as well crawl out of the stream at once and lay itself meekly down in the basket.