Perhaps she has.  I don’t judge her; she ’s an extraordinary young person.  She has been told twenty times a day by her mother, since she was five years old, that she is a beauty of beauties, that her face is her fortune, and that, if she plays her cards, she may marry a duke.  If she has not been fatally corrupted, she is a very superior girl.  My own impression is that she is a mixture of good and bad, of ambition and indifference.  Mrs. Light, having failed to make her own fortune in matrimony, has transferred her hopes to her daughter, and nursed them till they have become a kind of monomania.  She has a hobby, which she rides in secret; but some day she will let you see it.  I ’m sure that if you go in some evening unannounced, you will find her scanning the tea-leaves in her cup, or telling her daughter’s fortune with a greasy pack of cards, preserved for the purpose.  She promises her a prince—­a reigning prince.  But if Mrs. Light is silly, she is shrewd, too, and, lest considerations of state should deny her prince the luxury of a love-match, she keeps on hand a few common mortals.  At the worst she would take a duke, an English lord, or even a young American with a proper number of millions.  The poor woman must be rather uncomfortable.  She is always building castles and knocking them down again—­always casting her nets and pulling them in.  If her daughter were less of a beauty, her transparent ambition would be very ridiculous; but there is something in the girl, as one looks at her, that seems to make it very possible she is marked out for one of those wonderful romantic fortunes that history now and then relates.  ’Who, after all, was the Empress of the French?’ Mrs. Light is forever saying.  ‘And beside Christina the Empress is a dowdy!’”

“And what does Christina say?”

“She makes no scruple, as you know, of saying that her mother is a fool.  What she thinks, heaven knows.  I suspect that, practically, she does not commit herself.  She is excessively proud, and thinks herself good enough to occupy the highest station in the world; but she knows that her mother talks nonsense, and that even a beautiful girl may look awkward in making unsuccessful advances.  So she remains superbly indifferent, and lets her mother take the risks.  If the prince is secured, so much the better; if he is not, she need never confess to herself that even a prince has slighted her.”

“Your report is as solid,” Rowland said to Madame Grandoni, thanking her, “as if it had been prepared for the Academy of Sciences;” and he congratulated himself on having listened to it when, a couple of days later, Mrs. Light and her daughter, attended by the Cavaliere and the poodle, came to his rooms to look at Roderick’s statues.  It was more comfortable to know just with whom he was dealing.