"You counsel procedures incompatible," he said. "If I am the custodian of a tradition, which you would have me maintain, how better could I play it false, than by marrying, of all women, the granddaughter, the heiress and representative, of the man who upset it?"
"You would heal a family feud, and blot out a wrong," said she, drawing patterns again with her sunshade. "Magnanimity should be part of your tradition. You would not visit the sins of the fathers upon the children? You don't hold your cousin personally responsible?"
She looked up obliquely at him.
"Personally," he answered, "my cousin may be the most innocent soul alive. She is born to a ready-made situation, and accepts it. But it is a situation which I, if I am to be loyal to my tradition, cannot accept. It is the negation of my tradition. I am obliged to submit to it, but I can't accept it. My cousin is the embodiment of the anti-tradition. You say—marry her. That is like inviting the Pope to ally himself with the Antipope."
"No, no," contended Susanna, arresting her sunshade in the midst of an intricate vermiculation. "For the Antipope must be in wilful personal rebellion; while your cousin is what she is, quite independently of her own will—perhaps in spite of it. Imagine me, for instance, in her place—me," she smiled, "the sole legitimist in Sampaolo. What could I do? I find myself in possession of stolen goods. I would, if I could, restore them at once to their rightful owner. But I can't—because I am only the tenant for life. I can't sell them, nor give them away, nor even, dying, dispose of them by will. I am only the tenant for life. After me, they must pass to the next heir. So, if I wish to restore them to their rightful owner, there 's but a single means of doing so open to me—I must induce the rightful owner to make me his wife."
She smiled again, mirthfully, but with conviction, with conclusiveness, as who should say, "I have proved my point."
"Ah," pronounced Anthony, with stress, though perhaps a trifle ambiguously, "if it were you, it would be different."
"In your cousin's case, to be sure," pursued Susanna, "there is one other means. You happen to be, on the Valdeschi side, her nearest kinsman, and therefore, until she marries and has children, you are her heir presumptive. Well, if she were to retire into a convent, taking vows of celibacy and poverty, then what they call the usufruct of her properties could be settled upon her heir presumptive for her lifetime, the properties themselves passing to him at her death."
"We will wish the young lady no such dreary fate," laughed Anthony.
"Fortunately for her, she is not troubled by your scruples."
"How do you know she is n't?" asked Susanna.