The Piccinino, Volume 2 (of 2); The last of Aldinis

by George Sand

"Oh! don't stand on ceremony," said she, continuing to eat with great zest.

The pie had such an alluring look and such a delicious odor that I listened to the philosophical arguments of common sense. I placed another partridge on another Japanese plate, which I rested on the keyboard of the piano, and began to eat with as much gusto as the signora.

"If this is not the castle of the Sleeping Beauty," I thought, "and if this cruel fairy is not the only living being in it, we shall soon see an uncle or a father or an aunt or a governess, or somebody who is supposed, in the eyes of honest folk, to serve as chaperon to this untamed creature. In case of any such apparition, I should like to know just how far this eccentric fashion of breakfasting on a piano, tête-à-tête with the young lady of the house, will be considered seemly. It matters little after all; I must find out just where these extravagant whims are likely to carry me, and if there is a woman's spite behind them, I will have my turn if I have to wait ten years."

As I reflected thus I watched my fair hostess over the piano. She was eating with superhuman appetite, and seemed to be in no wise possessed by the idiotic mania which young ladies have of eating only in secret, and pressing their lips together at table with a sentimental air, as if they were of a nature superior to ours. Lord Byron had not yet introduced the fashion of lack of appetite among the fair sex. So that my capricious signora abandoned herself with all her heart to the enjoyment of feasting, and in a few moments she returned to me and took a fillet of hare and a pheasant's wing from the dismantled pie. She looked at me without a smile, and said sententiously: "This east wind gives me an appetite."

"It seems that your ladyship is blessed with an excellent digestive apparatus," I observed.

"If one had not a good stomach at fifteen," she replied, "it would be as well to throw up the sponge."

"Fifteen!" I cried, looking at her closely and dropping my fork.

"Fifteen years and two months," she replied, returning to her hassock with her freshly-filled plate; "my mother is not yet thirty-two, and she married again last year. Tell me, isn't it strange that a mother should marry before her daughter? To be sure, if my darling little mother had chosen to wait for me to be married, she would have had to wait a long while. Who would ever marry a girl who, although she is beautiful, is stupid beyond anything one can imagine?"

There was so much merriment and good-humor in the serious air with which she made fun of me; she was such a pretty loustig, that tall girl with the black eyes and the long curls falling over a neck as white as alabaster; her manner of sitting on her cushion was so graceful yet so chaste in its perfect naturalness, that all my suspicion and all my evil designs vanished. I had determined to empty the decanter of wine in order to put my scruples to sleep. I pushed the decanter away, and, having satisfied my appetite, rested my elbow on the piano and began to study her anew, and under a new aspect. That revelation as to her age had thrown all my ideas into confusion. When I have desired to form an opinion concerning a person, especially one of the fair sex, I have always considered it a matter of the utmost importance to ascertain that person's age as nearly as possible. Subtlety increases so rapidly in women that six months more or less often make the difference between the innocence which is deviltry and the deviltry which is innocence. Until then I had imagined that La Grimani was at least twenty years old. She was so tall and strong and dark, and there was so much self-assurance in her glance, in her bearing, in her every movement, that everybody made the same mistake at first sight. But on examining her more closely I realized my error. Her shoulders were broad and powerful, but her breast was still undeveloped. Although her whole attitude was womanly there were certain little ways and certain expressions of the face which revealed the child. Nothing more was needed than that hearty appetite, that total absence of coquetry, and the audacious impropriety of the tête-à-tête she had arranged to have with me, to make it clear to my eyes that I had to do, not as I had supposed at first, with a proud and crafty woman of the world, but with a mischievous boarding-school girl, and I thrust aside with horror the idea of abusing her imprudence.

I remained for a long while absorbed in this scrutiny, forgetting to reply to the significant challenge I had received. She looked at me earnestly, and I no longer thought of avoiding her glance, but of analyzing it. She had the loveliest eyes in the world, flush with her face, and very wide open; their glance was always sharp and direct, and grasped its object instantly. It was imperious but not overbearing, a very rare thing in a woman. It was the revelation and the expression of a fearless, proud, and sincere mind. It questioned all things with an air of authority, and seemed to say: "Conceal nothing from me: for I have nothing to conceal from anybody."