“Perfectly,” he replied, but seemed not altogether pleased. Perhaps he would have found a less self-sufficing woman more interesting and amiable. “Still, I beg your pardon for a question which, after all, no one should ask. One never knows what may have happened in a life.”
“That is true,” she replied. “And it is true that the question might be to some an embarrassing one to answer. It does not hurt me, however.”
“Papa does not allow us to ask questions,” Isabel said a little complainingly, having caught a few words of their talk. “You have no idea how sharply he will speak to us, or, at least, look at us, if he hears us asking the simplest question that can be at all personal. And yet people question us unmercifully. I think one might retort in self-defence.”
“How I wish you could have a larger number of pupils than these two, Mr. Vane!” the Signora sighed. “I would like to send some of my lady friends to school to you. The questions that some ladies, who consider themselves well bred, will ask, are astonishing. Indeed, there is, I think, more vulgarity in fine
society than among any other class of people in the world. Delicacy and refinement are flowers that need a little shade to keep their freshness. I have more than once been shocked to see, in a momentary revelation, how slight was the difference of character between a bold, unscrupulous virago of the streets, and some fine lady when an unpleasant excitement had disturbed the thin polish of manner with which she was coated. Madame de Montespan—not a model by any means, though—relates that, when she came to Paris to be trained for polite life, among the admonitions and prohibitions, one of the strongest was that she must not ask questions. Not long ago, on thinking over a conversation I had with a lady whom I had known just three weeks, I found that these questions had been propounded to me in the course of it: How old are you? Who visits you? What is your income? Have you any money laid up? Have you sold your last story? To whom have you sold it? How much do they pay you? Is it paid for? Of course the lady was fitting herself to speak with authority of my affairs.”
The Signora made an impatient motion of the shoulders, as if throwing off a disagreeable burden. “How did we fall into this miserable subject? Let us walk about awhile and shake it off. We might go into the church and say a little prayer for poor Beatrice Cenci, who is buried here. One glance at Piombo’s Scourging of Christ, one thought of that girl’s terrible tragedy, will scorch out these petty thoughts, if one breath of the Lord’s presence should not blow them away.”
She hurried up the steps and ran into the church, as one soiled and
dusty with travel rushes into a bath. Coming out again, they strolled back into the gardens, and looked off over the green sea of the luxuriant Campagna, where St. Paul’s Church floated like an ark, half swamped in verdure and flowers, and a glistening bend of the Tiber bound the fragrantly breathing groves like a girdle, the bridge across it a silver buckle. Beneath the wall that stopped their feet a grassy angle of the villa beyond was red with poppies growing on their tall stems in the shade. So everywhere in Italy the faithful soil commemorates the blood of the martyrs that has been sprinkled over it, a scarlet blossom for every precious drop, flowering century after century; to flower in centuries to come, till at last the scattered dust and dew shall draw together again into the new body, like scattered musical notes gathering into a song, and the glorified spirit shall catch and weld them into one for ever!
Looking awhile, they turned silently back into the garden. The two girls wandered among the flowers; Mr. Vane and the Signora walked silently side by side. Now and then they stopped to admire a campanile of lilies growing around a stem higher than their heads, springing from the midst of a sheaf of leaves like swords. One of these leaves, five feet long, perhaps, thrown aside by the gardener, lay in the path. It was milk-white and waxy, like a dead body, through its thickness of an inch or two. Long, purple thorns were set along its sides and at the point, and a faint tinge of gold color ran along the centre of its blade. It was not a withered leaf, but a dead one, and strong and beautiful in death.
Mr. Vane glanced over the bristling