“No position at all.  He is kicking his heels, as my father would say.  You see, he has only just finished his military service.”

“As a private?”

“I suppose so.  There is general conscription.  He was in the Bersaglieri, I think.  Isn’t that the crack regiment?”

“The men in it must be short and broad.  They must also be able to walk six miles an hour.”

She looked at him wildly, not understanding all that he said, but feeling that he was very clever.  Then she continued her defence of Signor Carella.

“And now, like most young men, he is looking out for something to do.”

“Meanwhile?”

“Meanwhile, like most young men, he lives with his people—­father, mother, two sisters, and a tiny tot of a brother.”

There was a grating sprightliness about her that drove him nearly mad.  He determined to silence her at last.

“One more question, and only one more.  What is his father?”

“His father,” said Miss Abbott.  “Well, I don’t suppose you’ll think it a good match.  But that’s not the point.  I mean the point is not—­I mean that social differences—­love, after all—­not but what—­I—­”

Philip ground his teeth together and said nothing.

“Gentlemen sometimes judge hardly.  But I feel that you, and at all events your mother—­so really good in every sense, so really unworldly—­after all, love-marriages are made in heaven.”

“Yes, Miss Abbott, I know.  But I am anxious to hear heaven’s choice.  You arouse my curiosity.  Is my sister-in-law to marry an angel?”

“Mr. Herriton, don’t—­please, Mr. Herriton—­a dentist.  His father’s a dentist.”

Philip gave a cry of personal disgust and pain.  He shuddered all over, and edged away from his companion.  A dentist!  A dentist at Monteriano.  A dentist in fairyland!  False teeth and laughing gas and the tilting chair at a place which knew the Etruscan League, and the Pax Romana, and Alaric himself, and the Countess Matilda, and the Middle Ages, all fighting and holiness, and the Renaissance, all fighting and beauty!  He thought of Lilia no longer.  He was anxious for himself:  he feared that Romance might die.

Romance only dies with life.  No pair of pincers will ever pull it out of us.  But there is a spurious sentiment which cannot resist the unexpected and the incongruous and the grotesque.  A touch will loosen it, and the sooner it goes from us the better.  It was going from Philip now, and therefore he gave the cry of pain.

“I cannot think what is in the air,” he began.  “If Lilia was determined to disgrace us, she might have found a less repulsive way.  A boy of medium height with a pretty face, the son of a dentist at Monteriano.  Have I put it correctly?  May I surmise that he has not got one penny?  May I also surmise that his social position is nil?  Furthermore—­”

“Stop!  I’ll tell you no more.”