They had very soon come to understand each other in matters of interest.  Lalli had begun by taking all her large earnings.  But Bianca very quickly let her protector understand that such an arrangement did not meet her views at all.  The ingratitude, when she owed everything to him alone!  No, Bianca had no intention to be ungrateful—­anzi! she looked upon Lalli as her father, and hoped she always should do so; but she had no intention of being treated like a child.  So long as she could earn anything, her adopted father should want for nothing.  She asked nothing better than to continue to live with him, and work for both of them.

And, in truth, her grateful kindness and fondness for the old man whom she had so long looked on as a father was Bianca’s strongest point in the way of moral excellence.  In all their nine years of partnership she had worked for him as much as for herself.  But her nine years of success ought to have made both the old man and his adopted daughter comfortably well off.  And it had done nothing of the kind.

They had laid by nothing.  Old Quinto had all his life been recklessly extravagant and thriftless; and his mode of education had not made Bianca less so.  If he was fond of dissipation and pleasure, she was not less fond of them on her side.  Careful as her education had been, it was hardly to be expected that it should have been eminently successful in forming a high standard of moral character.  The demands made by society upon its members in general in the clime and time in question were not of a very exacting nature; and the expectations of society in this respect from a person in Bianca’s position were more moderate still.  Nor were the precepts, counsels, example, or wisdom of her protector at all calculated to guide the beautiful singer scatheless through the dangers and difficulties incidental to her position.

In short, for nine years Bianca had worked hard—­had earned a great deal of money, and had spent it all (except what Lalli had spent for her) in dissipation, the sharers in which had been chosen by the beautiful actress—­as kissing goes—­by favour, and not with any view to their ability to pay the cost.

And now La Lalli had reached her twenty-seventh year; and was very nearly as poor as when she began her career.  And certain small warnings, unimportant as yet, and wholly unsuspected, save by herself and old Quinto, had begun to suggest to her the expediency of thinking a little for the future.  She and Quinto Lalli had had a very serious conversation on the subject just before the commencement of that season at Milan, which, as has been hinted, had ended somewhat disagreeably for the charming singer.

The real truth of the matter was that the difficulty in question had arisen not from any tendency in the lady to behave in the Lombard capital with more reprehensible levity than, it must unfortunately be admitted, she had been very well known to have behaved in other places and on other occasions; but from a change in her manners in a diametrically opposite direction.  It was a change of tactics, which the strictest moralist must have admitted to involve an improvement in moral conduct, that got the hardly treated Diva into trouble.