“But all this takes so much time,” she said, seeing that he waited for a response.
“It is for such uses that time was given us,” he replied.
She struggled for another objection, her mind rapidly becoming swamped in the conversation. “Then you think that we can arrange and order all our feelings, and make our hearts as regular as clocks; and if we lose a friend, by examining why he died, and why we grieve for him, we can reason ourselves into indifference.”
“No,” he said again. “We can undoubtedly subdue the violence of unreasonable grief by such examination, but there are deep and ineradicable reasons why we should grieve when we lose those dear to us.”
The girl’s eyes brightened. “Why,” she said, “it all seems to me only a difference of terms. You mean just what everybody means, only you say everything, and others haven’t time nor wit for that. It all amounts to the same thing in the end. We say, ‘Such and such a thing is natural,’ where you say it is mathematical, voilà tout.”
He began to say something about the natural including both good and bad, while his meaning was to exclude the bad; but the Signora took pity on his victim, and stopped his eloquence by offering him a cup of tea.
“He will take the tea,” she thought, pouring another cup, “because the beverage is agreeable to the palate and refreshing to the body, and, by consequence, enlivening to the mind, and he will see the whole subject worked out to its smallest part as he stirs in the sugar. He will put in sugar because—because—dear me! I wonder what is the good reason for putting sugar in tea! How uncomfortable it all is! I should go mad with such a man about me all the time. And yet how well-bred, and earnest, and handsome he is! If only it might happen that he would mellow with time, and learn to take subjects by their convenient handles, and not spread them out so! He makes me remember that I am a skeleton, with—pah! How glad I am I don’t know all about my bones!”
“What are you studying out, Signora?” asked Isabel at her elbow.
“I am trying not to see everything crumble at once into its elements,” she replied distressfully. “My dear, if you will make that man talk like a human being, I shall be thankful. Find out if he has a heart, or only a triangle instead; and just watch his fingers to see if there are little scales and figures marked along the insides of them. He is worth rescuing. I like him.”
The little baroness went, and more people came in. It was after Ave Maria, and they were obliged to light the candles, and close the windows and shutters on the street. But the great sala needed not to be closed, for no one could see into it, and so the exquisite twilight was left free to enter, with only the soft light of a single hanging lamp to shame its tender radiance. This