"I thank you," returned that unabashed young man. "It was quite realistic enough for me. If all my foreign traitors had done as well by me as this one!" His eyes sought Nancy's. For an instant neither of them could speak. But the girl could not resist putting out her hand. And no one minded when he took it. "But I thanked the gods," he could then say with a laugh, "for my Italian accent! I knew two or three phrases from the Garibaldi play—and then I knew the sound and some of the sense from—Chris's farm. But I could have wished, none the less, to be better equipped."
"Rotten to have to make out so much funk!" contributed Stanley. "So's to seem like that scared-to-death fellow."
"On the whole, that was the best thing I did. It came quite easy!"
"But the choice?" inquired Mrs. Deutch. "How did you make that choice, dear sir, amidst the goblets?"
"Only luck—I just chanced it. Gold, silver, and lead—can't you guess?"
He looked at Christina, and Christina blushed. Deutch glanced up twinkling.
"Ah, tante," said the girl, "you will never understand—you have not the artistic temperament! 'What find I here? Fair Portia's counterfeit!' That was it, Will? Ah, my dear, and to think you've never played the scene!"
Her pensiveness turned sterner. She looked at him with reproving eyes. "You took it out of a part!" she said. "Heaven help us, of what are we made? That shot I fired—that last shot—I took that out of a part, too! 'A Princess Imprisoned,' the end of the third act. And you with your 'Merchant of Venice' and your casket scene! It's true what they say of us—we're stuffed with sawdust!"
"We'd be fools not to use it, then," Denny comfortably retorted. "Though you might certainly have chosen a better play."
"No, you don't understand me. It's too bad, it's wrong—all wrong! It cheapens life. It dulls the value of what we feel. To think of written things at such a moment and throw oneself on them—it's like an insincerity of the heart. It's like acting a lie. And with all my faults, that one fault I never had," Christina said. "I was never a liar!" And she turned on them the ineffable starry candor of her wide, cool eyes.