"Never again!" Vanno said fervently, pressing her hand under the blue cover of dusk.
It did not occur to Mary that they both took her for a much younger girl than she really was. She had lived so entirely under the jurisdiction of those older than herself that in many ways she had remained a child. And she had begun by feeling still younger than before, after suddenly blossoming into independence. It was only since the night of Christmas, when the frost of unhappiness nipped the newly unfolded petals, that the flower had begun to droop. Now that dark time was already forgotten. She could hardly realize that it had ever been. In the joy of Vanno's love for her, and his old friend's fatherly kindness, she basked in the contentment of being understood, loved, taken care of; and she knew that she was a woman, not a child, only by the capacity to love a man as a woman loves. If she had said, "But I am nearly twenty-five," the two men would have realized at once that her school days must have ended long ago, even if prolonged beyond the usual time; and they would have asked themselves, if they had not asked her, where she had spent the years between then and now, in order to account for that ignorance of the world which to them explained and excused everything she had done at Monte Carlo. But it did not enter Mary's mind to mention her age.
"Upon some natures such teaching might not have made the same impression, of course," the curé went on, thoughtfully. "This dear child, it seems to me, has a very—how shall I express it?—a very old-fashioned nature. Nothing, I believe, could ever have turned her into one of those hard modern girls they are running up now like buildings made of concrete on steel frames. But the convent teaching has accentuated all in her that was already what I call 'old-fashioned.' And you, too, my Principino, you are old-fashioned!"
"I?" exclaimed Vanno, surprised.
"Yes. You will suit each other well, you two, I prophesy. You have an old-fashioned nature: but do not think when I say that, I place you on a shelf at the back of the world's cupboard. All Romans, all Italian men, are old-fashioned at heart—and it is the heart that counts, though we do not always know it; and most of us would not like others to know it of ourselves. You have been much in the East, Principino, and you have learned to love the desert; but you would not have loved it as you do were it not for the spirit of romance which keeps you old-fashioned under a very thin veneer of what is modern. I saw this in you when you were a boy and my pupil; and I must say it made me love you the better. It is perhaps the secret which draws the love of others toward you, without their knowing why, though it has caused life to jar on you often, no doubt, and may again. You would not, perhaps, have fallen into the mistake by which you hurt yourself and this dear child if you had not been old-fashioned. Don't you see that?"
"I suppose it is old-fashioned to have an ideal," Vanno admitted, laughing a little.
"Yes. And most old-fashioned of all, even I can see, are your ideas of women. So it is well you have fallen in love with one who is not modern."
"I know she is the Only Woman. But I grant that I may have picked up some Eastern ideas of what a woman's life ought to be. I must get rid of them, I suppose."
"You didn't 'pick those ideas up,' my son. They were in your blood. All the same, you may get rid of a few—a very few—with advantage. And safely too, because you are going to have an old-fashioned girl for your wife."
"I'm going to have her very soon, I hope," Vanno added, in a different tone.