“I can imagine many extenuating circumstances”
“Perhaps,” replied the Senator slowly, the personification of forgiving charity, “it might be best to let the matter drop.”
“But I simply can’t wear the ring! I’d feel such a fraud, and I’d soon be disliking him, though this may not be at all his fault. Besides, someone might——”
“That could be easily arranged.” Her father’s eyes twinkled—he was preparing to treat the discovered deception as a little private joke on the prince between his daughter and himself. “We can get Tiffany to set an emerald in the ring. No one will know. And some day you can tease him about it. If he is innocent it would mortify him to learn the truth now, wouldn’t it?”
Elsie smiled somewhat cheerfully. She was trying hard to make herself doubt the prince’s guilty knowledge. “It must be done right away,” she said.
She wore her gloves that afternoon. But Rontivogli, with nerves like a sensitive plant’s leaves, felt a change in her, hard though she tried to seem unchanged. In the clear light of hind-sight he had been cursing himself for saying so much to her of Madame Almansa’s insinuations; and at first he feared that by his blundering he had roused suspicion in her. But she showed that she was still in the mood to marry him, and the negotiations for settlements went smoothly on between Senator Pope’s lawyer and the attorney to the Italian Embassy, whom he had engaged to represent him. He dismissed his fear as a wild imagining of guilt and set himself to remove the coolness just under Elsie’s surface of warmth by lavishing his “temperament” upon her. And he was rewarded with swift success. A flaw in such a lover was as inconsequential as a flaw in an emerald—and was it not as much a matter of course?
Toward the end of the week she went with her father to New York, and in two days Tiffany changed the setting for a consideration of four thousand eight hundred dollars. She returned fully restored—but she kept the false stone, hid it far back in the bottom of her jewel-safe.
The shock and its after-effects were soon over. She was a little astonished that she, so used to the quaint ways of foreigners, should have attached importance to the quaintness of this foreigner—a lover who was fiery and infatuated, a lover who sang, a lover who was a Prince of a “house” that ruled and plotted and patronised the arts when Europe beyond the Alps was a savage wilderness. Rontivogli had not been studying women for twenty years—or ever since he was eighteen—aided by a classic face, a classic figure, a classic name, and classic recklessness, without learning thoroughly the business he was now following.
Frothingham had ceased to hope, and, for lack of any other opening, was arranging to go to Chicago, there to visit his steamer friend Barney, whom he had not permitted to forget him—Barney had a marriageable daughter and was rated at eleven millions; also, Chicago was reputed to be a promising field for titled foreigners. He felt that he was neglecting business in lingering at Washington. He saw no signs, heard no news, of available rich girls or rich men’s daughters. Half a dozen questions about any girl and he would get an answer that would force him to strike her from his list—the father was opposed to large settlements; the family was opposed to international marriages; the family’s social ambitions were of the new cis-Atlantic kind; the daughter was already engaged; the mother’s aim was for princely or ducal rank. And he was kept in low spirits by the spectacle of the triumphant Rontivogli and was exasperated by Elsie’s treating him as an object of pity, a rejected and inconsolable lover.
As he sat alone in a corner of the club, staring with grim satire into the ugly face of his affairs, upon him intruded a man whom he had often described as the most viciously tiresome person he had ever met—Count Eitel zu Blickenstern. He disliked Blickenstern because he was a German; he avoided him because he was dull, because he was a chronic and ingenious borrower of small sums of money, and because every remark that seemed to him to have been intended humourously was hailed by him with a loud, mirthless laugh—the laugh of those who have no notion of wit or humour and fear their deformity will be discovered.