Aunt Clo's mouth took on an embittered curve at the recollection.
"Let me recommend you to cultivate that young man rather more, bambina, when next our quartette sallies forth in company. He repays study, I assure you. Besides," added Aunt Clo with some acidity of tone, "I will not conceal from you that a whole day spent in listening to so much youthful arrogance would try my nerves considerably. He is your contemporary, my Lily. I shall leave you to deal with him."
Lily felt vaguely sorry to hear it.
"He is much younger than Mr. Aubray, isn't he?" she asked.
"By at least ten years, I should imagine," said her aunt emphatically. "Nicholas Aubray must be nearing forty. But the heart of a boy still. Ce cher Nicholas! He should have married, as I have often told him. Now della Torre, who could well learn rather more of life in the wider, bigger sense of the word, is actually in search of a wife, as I know. But fools have ever rushed in——"
Aunt Clo ended with raised eyebrows and a sigh, leaving no doubt, in Lily's mind, that her own destined rôle in the Frascati expedition was that of recipient of the Marchese's polished conversation.
Perhaps her efforts were not sufficiently decided.
Perhaps Nicholas Aubray, with a certain joyful obtuseness that he was disconcertingly apt to display when dealing with the human equation, still triumphantly furthered the intercourse of the two fine spirits between whom he had elected to find so rare an affinity. Perhaps, as Lily herself suspected, the Marchese liked a youthful and ignorant hearer less well than one with whom discussion was at least possible, even if unprofitable. At all events, he explained Frascati to Miss Stellenthorpe, and twice informed her that she had been misinformed regarding the remote ancestry of the family of Aldobrandini, while Lily and Nicholas Aubray loitered beneath the trees, and Nicholas told Lily that he lived by himself in London and was often very lonely.
"But to you, I suppose, I seem almost old. Too old to want new friends?" he asked her with a wistful air of desiring contradiction, and at the same time throwing out his broad chest and straightening his always straight shoulders with obviously unconscious vanity.
Lily remembered her father. He was over fifty, and she certainly did not look upon him as being old, if only because she knew that he would have regarded the application of such an adjective from a child to a parent as being both disrespectful and disloyal.