“That’s a part of it too, I suppose?”

“Yes, as I have told you before.  You are in love with her, and yet you can’t make her out; that’s just where I was with regard to Madame de Salvi.”

“And she too was an enchantress, an actress, an artist, and all the rest of it?”

“She was the most perfect coquette I ever knew, and the most dangerous, because the most finished.”

“What you mean, then, is that her daughter is a finished coquette?”

“I rather think so.”

Stanmer walked along for some moments in silence.

“Seeing that you suppose me to be a—­a great admirer of the Countess,” he said at last, “I am rather surprised at the freedom with which you speak of her.”

I confessed that I was surprised at it myself.  “But it’s on account of the interest I take in you.”

“I am immensely obliged to you!” said the poor boy.

“Ah, of course you don’t like it.  That is, you like my interest—­I don’t see how you can help liking that; but you don’t like my freedom.  That’s natural enough; but, my dear young friend, I want only to help you.  If a man had said to me—­so many years ago—­what I am saying to you, I should certainly also, at first, have thought him a great brute.  But after a little, I should have been grateful—­I should have felt that he was helping me.”

“You seem to have been very well able to help yourself,” said Stanmer.  “You tell me you made your escape.”

“Yes, but it was at the cost of infinite perplexity—­of what I may call keen suffering.  I should like to save you all that.”

“I can only repeat—­it is really very kind of you.”

“Don’t repeat it too often, or I shall begin to think you don’t mean it.”

“Well,” said Stanmer, “I think this, at any rate—­that you take an extraordinary responsibility in trying to put a man out of conceit of a woman who, as he believes, may make him very happy.”

I grasped his arm, and we stopped, going on with our talk like a couple of Florentines.

“Do you wish to marry her?”

He looked away, without meeting my eyes.  “It’s a great responsibility,” he repeated.

“Before Heaven,” I said, “I would have married the mother!  You are exactly in my situation.”

“Don’t you think you rather overdo the analogy?” asked poor Stanmer.

“A little more, a little less—­it doesn’t matter.  I believe you are in my shoes.  But of course if you prefer it, I will beg a thousand pardons and leave them to carry you where they will.”

He had been looking away, but now he slowly turned his face and met my eyes.  “You have gone too far to retreat; what is it you know about her?”

“About this one—­nothing.  But about the other—­”

“I care nothing about the other!”

“My dear fellow,” I said, “they are mother and daughter—­they are as like as two of Andrea’s Madonnas.”