“You please yourself and your own fanciful temperament by those arguments,” said Angela,—­“but they are totally without principle.  Oh, why,” and raising her eyes, she fixed them on him with an earnest look, “Why will you not understand?  Sylvie is good and pure,—­why would you persuade her to be otherwise?”

Fontenelle rose and took one or two turns up and down the room before replying.

“I expect you will never comprehend me,” he said at last, stopping before Angela, “In fact, I confess sometimes I do not comprehend myself.  Of course Sylvie is good and pure—­I know that;—­I should not be so violently in love with her if she were not—­but I do not see that her acceptance of me as a lover would make her anything else than good and pure.  Because I know that she would be faithful to me.”

“Faithful to you—­yes!—­while you were faithless to her!” said Angela, with a generous indignation in her voice, “You would expect her to be true while you amused yourself with other women.  A one-sided arrangement truly!”

The Marquis seemed unmoved.

“Every relation between the sexes is one-sided,” he declared, “It is not my fault!  The woman gives all to one,—­the man gives a little to many.  I really am not to blame for falling in with this general course of things.  You look very angry with me, Donna Sovrani, and your eyes positively abash me;—­you are very loyal to your friend and I admire you for it; but after all, why should you be so hard upon me?  I am no worse than Varillo.”

Angela started, and her cheeks crimsoned.

“Than Varillo?  What do you mean?”

“Well, Varillo has Pon-Pon,—­of course she is useful—­what he would do without her I am sure I cannot imagine,—­still she is Pon-Pon.”

He paused, checked by Angela’s expression.

“Please explain yourself, Marquis,” she said in cold, calm accents, “I am at a loss to understand you.”

Fontenelle glanced at her and saw that her face had grown as pale as it was recently flushed, and that her lips were tightly set; and in a vague way he was sorry to have spoken.  But he was secretly chafing at everything,—­he was angry that Sylvie had escaped him,—­and angrier still that Donna Sovrani should imply by her manner, if not by her words, that she considered him an exceptional villain, when he himself was aware that nearly all the men of his “Cercle” resembled him.

“Pon-Pon is Signor Varillo’s model,” he said curtly, “I thought you were aware of it.  She appears in nearly all his pictures.”

Angela breathed again.

“Oh, is that all!” she murmured, and laughed.

Fontenelle opened his eyes a little, amazed at her indifference.  What a confiding, unsuspecting creature was this “woman of genius”!  This time, however, he was discreet, and kept his thoughts to himself.

“That is all,” he said, “But . . . artists have been known to admire their models in more ways than one.”