Lavinia elaborately masked her hot resentment at this fresh stupidity. She must not, she felt, allow Orsi to discover her feeling for Abrego y Mochales; that was a secret she must keep forever from the profane world. She would die, perhaps at a terribly advanced age, with it locked in her heart. But if Gheta married him she would go into a convent.
“A bull-fighter, I believe,” she said carelessly.
“In other words, a brute,” Orsi continued. “Such men are not fit for the society of—of your sister. One would think his mere presence would make her ill.... Yet she seemed quite pleased.”
“Strange!” Lavinia spoke with innocent eyes.
It was like turning a knife in her wound to agree apparently with Cesare Orsi—rather, she wanted to laugh at him coldly and leave him standing alone; but she must cultivate her defenses. There was, too, a sort of negative pleasure in misleading the banker, a sort of torment not unlike that enjoyed by the early martyrs.
Cesare Orsi regarded her with new interest and approbation.
“You're a sensible girl,” he proclaimed; “and extremely pretty in the bargain.” He added this in an accent of profound surprise, as if she had suddenly grown presentable under his eyes. “In some ways,” he went on, gathering conviction, “you are as handsome as Gheta.”
“Thank you, Signor Orsi,” Lavinia responded with every indication of a modesty, which, in fact, was the indifference of a supreme contempt.
“I have been blind,” he asseverated, vivaciously gesticulating with his thick hands.
Lavinia studied him with a remote young brutality, from his fluffy disarranged hair, adhering to his wet brow, to his extravagantly pointed shoes. The ridiculous coral charm hanging from his heavy watch chain, a violent green handkerchief, an insufferable cameo pin—all contributed pleasurably to the lowering of her opinion of him.