"Certainly I don't think any room full of strangers would judge you
to be more than that," replied Bianca, looking at him seriously.
"Ta!--ta!--ta! Add fifteen years to that; and you will be nearer the
mark. So you see, bella Signora, that you may safely trust yourself
to a tete-a-tete with me under any circumstances."
"Ta!--ta!--ta!" said Bianca, repeating his own phrase, with a merry
laugh in her eyes, and shaking her rich auburn curls at him. "It
seems impossible, utterly incredible! But I am very glad if it is
so,--very glad. There is nothing so intolerable to me as the young
lads who come buzzing about one circumstanced as I am, and whom it
is as difficult to drive away as it is to drive away flies in
summer. There is no trusting to them; they would compromise a poor
girl as soon as look at her, if she was fool enough to let them. And
I have had lessons in the necessity of caution, Signor Marchese. I
have been cruelly treated,--very cruelly calumniated!" And Bianca,
knowing, it is to be supposed, that, if it is not always the case
that "Beauty's tear is lovelier than her smile," as the poet says,
yet that it is a phase of beauty often more potent over a male heart
than the sunniest smile, raised a corner of her daintily-embroidered
handkerchief to her eyes.
The Marchese was an old man of the world,--as the cynical phrase
goes,--and of what a world?--an old Italian Marchese of the
beginning of the nineteenth century,--a period when, if crime was
less rife than in former and stronger ages, morality was never at a
lower ebb.
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