“But you do marry out of your class. Italian nobles have married American women who were without family.”
He gave a gay smile, jerking his head with a little agreeing movement toward his shoulder:
“Ah, truly, yes, but with fortunes—large fortunes. We need them, we have not got the huge moneys in Italy that you have here. But the adorable Miss Harris has nothing. Figure to yourself, Mrs. Drake; she must work for her living. If I come home to my father with a story like that, what happens? He is enraged, he turns me out—and then I have to work for my living.” He gave a delightful boyish laugh. “At what?—pasting letters in a book? That is all I know.”
“Foreigners are very hard for Americans to understand,” I muttered, wondering if any foreigner of any race would ever have understood why a respectable American widow should offer her friend in marriage to an unwilling Italian count.
He leaned from his chair, pointing the smoking cigarette at me. His melancholy had vanished. He was a boy again, a light-hearted Latin boy, intrigued and amused at the sentimental point of view obtaining under the stars and stripes.
“It is you who are hard for us to understand—so loving money and so loving love. And which you like the best we can’t find out. For us one is here and one is there.” He pointed with the cigarette to two opposite corners of the room. “Miss Harris I adore but I do not marry her.” He planted his romance in the left-hand corner with a jab of his cigarette. “And I marry a lady whom I may not love, but who has fortune and who is of my class.” He planted her in the opposite corner with a second jab. “They are so far apart.” And he waved the cigarette between the two, with a sweep wide enough to indicate the distance that severed sentiment from obligation.
That was the end of it. I pulled myself together and led the conversation into a comparison of national characteristics. I don’t know what he thought of me, probably that I was a horrible example of what can be produced by a romance-ridden country.
When I think of it now (if I cared a farthing what happened to me) I would be quite scared. I wonder if I’ve inherited a queer strain from any of my forebears. They don’t look like it, but you can’t tell from portraits and miniatures. In their days it was the fashion to paint out all discreditable characteristics as, in ours, it is the highest merit to paint them in. Could it be possible that one of those pop-eyed, tight-mouthed women ever swerved from “a sweet reasonableness” and bequeathed the tendency to me? I’ve read somewhere that while the inclination to wrong-doing may not be transmitted, the weakened will can pass on. Is my lunacy of to-day, my distracted waverings, my temptations to disloyalty, the result of some one else’s lapse from the normal? (The lamp’s going out. With the room getting dim I can see the moonlight in a clear wash of silver on the windows.) It wasn’t the little Huguenot lady. But her husband opposite, the formidable Puritan in the wig, was one of the jury who condemned the witches. That may be it. His cruelty is coming back to be paid for by his descendant—the poor old witches are getting even at last. Perhaps my descendants will some day writhe in atonement for my faults. But I have no descendants! I never will have.
It’s the lamp’s last sputter—going out as I’m going out. In a minute it will be dark, with the moonlight filling the gulfs of the backyards and I, alone in the night, listening to the stillness, wondering if I was only created to be an expiatory offering.