“The truth is God’s, it isn’t man’s; we had better leave it alone. Who can judge of it—who can say?”
“We are terribly in the dark, I know,” I admitted; “but if we give up trying what becomes of all the fine things? What becomes of the work I just mentioned, that of the great philosophers and poets? It is all vain words if there is nothing to measure it by.”
“You talk as if you were a tailor,” said Miss Bordereau whimsically; and then she added quickly, in a different manner, “This house is very fine; the proportions are magnificent. Today I wanted to look at this place again. I made them bring me out here. When your man came, just now, to learn if I would see you, I was on the point of sending for you, to ask if you didn’t mean to go on. I wanted to judge what I’m letting you have. This sala is very grand,” she pursued, like an auctioneer, moving a little, as I guessed, her invisible eyes. “I don’t believe you often have lived in such a house, eh?”
“I can’t often afford to!” I said.
“Well then, how much will you give for six months?”
I was on the point of exclaiming—and the air of excruciation in my face would have denoted a moral face—“Don’t, Juliana; for HIS sake, don’t!” But I controlled myself and asked less passionately: “Why should I remain so long as that?”
“I thought you liked it,” said Miss Bordereau with her shriveled dignity.
“So I thought I should.”
For a moment she said nothing more, and I left my own words to suggest to her what they might. I half-expected her to say, coldly enough, that if I had been disappointed we need not continue the discussion, and this in spite of the fact that I believed her now to have in her mind (however it had come there) what would have told her that my disappointment was natural. But to my extreme surprise she ended by observing: “If you don’t think we have treated you well enough perhaps we can discover some way of treating you better.” This speech was somehow so incongruous that it made me laugh again, and I excused myself by saying that she talked as if I were a sulky boy, pouting in the corner, to be “brought round.” I had not a grain of complaint to make; and could anything have exceeded Miss Tita’s graciousness in accompanying me a few nights before to the Piazza? At this the old woman went on: “Well, you brought it on yourself!” And then in a different tone, “She is a very nice girl.” I assented cordially to this proposition, and she expressed the hope that I did so not merely to be obliging, but that I really liked her. Meanwhile I wondered still more what Miss Bordereau was coming to. “Except for me, today,” she said, “she has not a relation in the world.” Did she by describing her niece as amiable and unencumbered wish to represent her as a parti?
It was perfectly true that I could not afford to go on with my rooms at a fancy price and that I had already devoted to my undertaking almost all the hard cash I had set apart for it. My patience and my time were by no means exhausted, but I should be able to draw upon them only on a more usual Venetian basis. I was willing to pay the venerable woman with whom my pecuniary dealings were such a discord twice as much as any other padrona di casa would have asked, but I was not willing to pay her twenty times as much. I told her so plainly, and my plainness appeared to have some success, for she exclaimed, “Very good; you have done what I asked—you have made an offer!”