She wooed him anew with those melting eyes, and her tone was soft as a caress.
"It is n't every man that I 'd offer to sacrifice three of the best years of my life for—and it is n't every man that I 'd offer to tell fibs for."
She threw back her head, and stood in an attitude to invite inspection.
"Don't I look twenty-five?" she asked. "If you had n't the honour of my personal acquaintance, would it ever occur to you that I 'm what you call 'a young girl'? Would n't you go about enquiring of every one, 'Who is that handsome, accomplished, and perfectly dressed woman of the world?'"
And she made him the drollest of little quizzical moues.
In effect, with her tall and rather sumptuously developed figure, with the humour and vivacity, the character and decision, of her face, with the glow deep in her eyes, the graver glow beneath the mirth that danced near their surface,—and then too, perhaps, with the unequivocal Southern richness of her colouring: the warm white and covert rose of her skin, the dense black of her undulating abundant hair, the sudden, sanguine red of her lips,—I think you would have taken her for more than twenty-two. There was nothing of the immature or the unfinished, nothing of the tentative, in her aspect. With no loss of freshness, there were the strength, the poise, the assurance, that we are wont to associate with a riper womanhood. Whether she looked twenty-five or not, she looked, at any rate, a completed product; she looked distinguished and worth while; she looked alive, alert: one in whom the blood coursed swiftly, the spirit burned vigorously; one who would love her pleasure, who could be wayward and provoking, but who could also be generous and loyal; she looked high-bred, one in whom there was race, as well as temperament and nerve.
The Commendatore, however, was a thousand miles from these considerations. He glared fiercely at her—as fiercely as it was in his mild old eyes to glare. He held himself erect and aloof, in a posture that was eloquent of haughty indignation.
"I will ask your Excellency a single question. Are you or are you not the Countess of Sampaolo?" he demanded sternly.
But Susanna was incorrigible.
"At your service—unless I was changed at nurse," she assented, dropping a curtsey; and an imp laughed in her eyes.