The Count’s head nearly collided with his toes in the bow that he made.
“Mr. Willard,” returned Miss Andrews, coldly, ignoring the Count, “feeling as I do that Count Bonetti is merely a bogus Count with acquisitive instincts, brought here, like myself, for literary purposes of which I cannot approve, I must reply to your question that you may not have that pleasure.”
With which remark (concludes Stuart Harley) Miss Marguerite Andrews swept proudly from the room, ordered her carriage, and went home, thereby utterly ruining the second story of her life that I had undertaken to write. But I shall make one more effort.
V
AN EXPERIMENT
“And thus I’ll curb her mad and headstrong humor.
He that knows better how to tame a shrew,
Now let him speak; ’tis charity to show.”—“Taming of the Shrew.”
“What would have happened if she had behaved differently, Stuart?” I asked, after I had read the pages he had so kindly placed at my disposal.
“Oh, nothing in particular to which she could reasonably object,” returned Harley. “The incidents of a truly realistic novel are rarely objectionable, except to people of a captious nature. I intended to have Bonetti dance attendance upon Miss Andrews for the balance of the season, that’s all, hoping thereby to present a good picture of life at Newport in July and part of August. About the middle of August I was going to transport the whole cast to Bar Harbor, for variety’s sake. That would have been another opportunity to get a good deal of the American summer atmosphere into the book. I wish I could afford the kind of summer I contemplated giving her.”
“You didn’t intend that she should fall in love with Bonetti?” I asked.
“Not to any serious extent,” said Harley, deprecatingly. “Even if she had a little, she’d have come out of it all right as soon as the hero turned up, and she had a chance to see the difference between a manly man of her own country and a little titled fortune hunter from the land of macaroni. Bonetti wasn’t to be a bad fellow at all. He was merely an Italian, which he couldn’t help, being born so, and therefore, as she said, of an acquisitive nature. There is no villany in that, however—that is, no reprehensible villany. He was after a rich marriage because he was fond of a life of ease. She’d have found him amusing, at any rate.”
“But he was bogus!” I suggested.