“Capisco bene,” said the Prince, dropping his eyes. He appeared to have closed them, for some moments, as if under a slow spasm of pain. “I can’t tell you what torments me most,” he presently went on—“the thought that sometimes makes my heart rise into my mouth. It’s a haunting fear.” And his pale face and disturbed respiration might indeed have been those of a man before whom some horrible spectre had risen.
“You needn’t tell me. I know what you mean, my poor friend.”
“Do you think then there is a danger—that she’ll drag my name, do what no one has ever dared to do? That I’d never forgive,” he declared almost under his breath; and the hoarseness of his whisper lent it a great effect.
Madame Grandoni hastily wondered if she had not better tell him (as it would prepare him for the worst) that his wife cared about as much for his name as for any old label on her luggage; but after an instant’s reflexion she reserved this information for another hour. Besides, as she said to herself, the Prince ought already to know perfectly to what extent Christina attached the idea of an obligation or an interdict to her ill-starred connexion with an ignorant and superstitious Italian race whom she despised for their provinciality, their parsimony and their futility (she thought their talk the climax of childishness) and whose fatuous conception of their importance in the great modern world she had on various public occasions sufficiently riddled with her derision. She finally contented herself with remarking: “Dear Prince, your wife’s a very proud woman.”
“Ah, how could my wife be anything else? But her pride’s not my pride. And she has such ideas; such opinions! Some of them are monstrous.”
Madame Grandoni smiled. “She doesn’t think it so necessary to have them when you’re not there.”
“Why then do you say that you enter into my fears—that you recognise the stories I’ve heard?”
I know not whether the good lady lost patience with his pressure; at all events she broke out with a certain sharpness. “Understand this, understand this: Christina will never consider you—your name, your illustrious traditions—in any case in which she doesn’t consider herself much more!”
The Prince appeared to study for a moment this somewhat ambiguous yet portentous phrase; then he slowly got up with his hat in his hand and walked about the room softly, solemnly, as if suffering from his long thin feet. He stopped before one of the windows and took another survey of South Street; then turning he suddenly asked in a voice into which he had evidently endeavoured to infuse a colder curiosity: “Is she admired in this place? Does she see many people?”
“She’s thought very strange of course. But she sees whom she likes. And they mostly bore her to death!” Madame Grandoni conscientiously added.