Then her voice modulated, and became confidential and exultant.
"I 'm going to have such a delicious plunge. See—to-night I have put on pearls, and diamonds, and rings, that the Baronessa would never let me wear. And I 've got a whole bagful of books, to read in the train—Anatole France, and Shakespeare, and Gyp, and Pierre Loti, and Molière, and Max Beerbohm, and everybody: all the books the Baronessa would have died a thousand deaths rather than let me look at. That's the nuisance of being a woman of position—you 're brought up never to read anything except the Lives of the Saints and the fashion papers. I 've had to do all my really important reading by stealth, like a thief in the night. Ah," she sighed, "if I were only a man, like you! But as for observing the decencies," she continued briskly, "you need have no fear. I 'm going to the land of all lands where (if report speaks true) one has most opportunities of observing them—I 'm going to England, and I 'll observe them with both eyes. And I 'm not travelling alone." She spurned the imputation. "There are Rosina and Serafino; and at the end of my journey I shall have Miss Sandus. You remember that nice Miss Sandus?" she asked, smiling up at him. "She is my fellow-conspirator. We arranged it all before she went away last autumn. I 'm to go to her house in London, and she will go with me to Craford. She 's frantically interested about my cousin. She thinks it's the most thrilling and romantic story she has ever heard. And she thoroughly sympathises with my desire to make friends with him, and to offer him some sort of reparation."
The Commendatore was pacing nervously backwards and forwards, being, I suppose, too punctilious an old-school Latin stickler for etiquette to interrupt.
But now, "Curse her for a meddlesome Englishwoman," he spluttered violently. "To encourage a young girl like you in such midsummer folly. A young girl?—a young hoyden, a young tom-boy. What? You will travel from here to London without a chaperon? And books—French novels—gr-r-r! I wish you had never been taught to read. I think it is ridiculous to teach women to read. What good will they get by reading? You deserve—upon my word you deserve . . . Well, never mind. Oh, body of Bacchus!"
He wrung his hands, as one in desperation.
"A young girl, a mere child," he cried, in a wail to Heaven; "a mere"—he paused, groping for an adequate definition—"a mere irresponsible female orphan! And nobody with power to interfere."
Susanna drew herself up.
"Young?" she exclaimed. "A mere child? I? Good gracious, I 'm twenty-two."
She said it, scanning the syllables to give them weight, and in all good faith I think, as who should say, "I 'm fifty."
"You really can't accuse me of being young," she apodictically pronounced. "I 'm twenty-two. Twenty-two long years—aïe, Dio mio! And I look even older. I could pass for twenty-five. If," was her suddenly-inspired concession, "if it will afford you the least atom of consolation, I 'll tell people that I am twenty-five. There."