The Marchesa smiled and fanned herself.

“Young girls without experience cannot understand these things,” she said.  “Wait till you are older.”

“And lose what looks I have and the power to enjoy anything!  And you say that you are not forcing me into this marriage!  And you try to think, or to make me think, that it is all for the best, and all delightful and all easy, when you are sacrificing me and my youth and my life and my happiness to the mere idea of a better position in society—­because poor papa was a sulphur merchant and bought a title which was only confirmed because he spent a million on a public charity—­and every one knows it—­and the Count of San Miniato comes of people who have been high and mighty gentlemen for six or seven hundred years, more or less.  That is your point of view, and you know it.  But if I say that my father worked hard to get what he got and deserved it, and was an honest man, and that this great personage of San Miniato is a penniless gambler, who does not know to-day where he will find pocket money for to-morrow, and has got by a trick the fortune my father got by hard work—­then you will not like it.  Then you will throw up your hands and cry ‘Beatrice!’ Then you will tell me that he loves me to distraction, and you will even try to make me think that I love him.  It is all a miserable sham, mamma, a vile miserable sham!  Give it up.  I have said that I will marry him, since it appears that I have promised.  But do not try to make me think that I am marrying him of my own free will, or he marrying me out of disinterested, pure, beautiful, upright affection!”

Having delivered herself of these particularly strong sentiments, Beatrice was silent for a while.  As for the Marchesa, she was either too wise, or too lazy, to answer her daughter for the present and she slowly fanned herself, lying quite still in her long chair, her eyes half closed and her left hand hanging down beside her.

Indeed Beatrice, instead of becoming more reconciled with the situation she had accepted, was growing more impatient and unhappy every day, as she realised all that her marriage with San Miniato would mean during the rest of her natural life.  She had quite changed her mind about him, and with natures like hers such sudden changes are often irrevocable.  She could not now understand how she could have ever liked him, or found pleasure in his society, and when she thought of the few words she had spoken and which had decided her fate, she could not comprehend the state of mind which had led her into such a piece of folly, and she was as angry with herself as, for the time being, she was angry with all the world besides.