Winterbourne was not in the best possible humour as he took his seat beside the author of his sacrifice. “That was not clever of you,” he said candidly, as the vehicle mingled again with the throng of carriages.

  “In such a case,” his companion answered, “I don’t want to be clever—I only want to be true!”

  “Well, your truth has only offended the strange little creature—it has only put her off.”

  “It has happened very well”—Mrs. Walker accepted her work. “If she’s so perfectly determined to compromise herself the sooner one knows it the better—one can act accordingly.”

  “I suspect she meant no great harm, you know,” Winterbourne maturely opined.

  “So I thought a month ago. But she has been going too far.”

  “What has she been doing?”

  “Everything that’s not done here. Flirting with any man she can pick up; sitting in corners with mysterious Italians; dancing all the evening with the same partners; receiving visits at eleven o’clock at night. Her mother melts away when the visitors come.”

  “But her brother,” laughed Winterbourne, “sits up till two in the morning.”

  “He must be edified by what he sees. I’m told that at their hotel every one’s talking about her and that a smile goes round among the servants when a gentleman comes and asks for Miss Miller.”

  “Ah we needn’t mind the servants!” Winterbourne compassionately signified. “The poor girl’s only fault,” he presently added, “is her complete lack of education.”

  “She’s naturally indelicate,” Mrs. Walker, on her side, reasoned. “Take that example this morning. How long had you known her at Vevey?”

  “A couple of days.”

  “Imagine then the taste of her making it a personal matter that you should have left the place!”

  He agreed that taste wasn’t the strong point of the Millers—after which he was silent for some moments; but only at last to add: “I suspect, Mrs. Walker, that you and I have lived too long at Geneva!” And he further noted that he should be glad to learn with what particular design she had made him enter her carriage.

  “I wanted to enjoin on you the importance of your ceasing your relations with Miss Miller; that of your not appearing to flirt with her; that of your giving her no further opportunity to expose herself; that of your in short letting her alone.”

  “I’m afraid I can’t do anything quite so enlightened as that,” he returned. “I like her awfully, you know.”

  “All the more reason you shouldn’t help her to make a scandal.”

  “Well, there shall be nothing scandalous in my attentions to her,” he was willing to promise.

  “There certainly will be in the way she takes them. But I’ve said what I had on my conscience,” Mrs. Walker pursued. “If you wish to rejoin the young lady I’ll put you down. Here, by the way, you have a chance.”

  The carriage was engaged in that part of the Pincian drive which overhangs the wall of Rome and overlooks the beautiful Villa Borghese. It is bordered by a large parapet, near which are several seats. One of these, at a distance, was occupied by a gentleman and a lady, toward whom Mrs. Walker gave a toss of her head. At the same moment these persons rose and walked to the parapet. Winterbourne had asked the coachman to stop; he now descended from the carriage. His companion looked at him a moment in silence and then, while he raised his hat, drove majestically away. He stood where he had alighted; he had turned his eyes toward Daisy and her cavalier. They evidently saw no one; they were too deeply occupied with each other. When they reached the low garden-wall they remained a little looking off at the great flat-topped pine-clusters of Villa Borghese; then the girl’s attendant admirer seated himself familiarly on the broad ledge of the wall. The western sun in the opposite sky sent out a brilliant shaft through a couple of cloud-bars; whereupon the gallant Giovanelli took her parasol out of her hands and opened it. She came a little nearer and he held the parasol over her; then, still holding it, he let it so rest on her shoulder that both of their heads were hidden from Winterbourne. This young man stayed but a moment longer; then he began to walk. But he walked—not toward the couple united beneath the parasol, rather toward the residence of his aunt Mrs. Costello.

  IV

  He flattered himself on the following day that there was no smiling among the servants when he at least asked for Mrs. Miller at her hotel. This lady and her daughter, however, were not at home; and on the next day after, repeating his visit, Winterbourne again was met by a denial. Mrs. Walker’s party took place on the evening of the third day, and in spite of the final reserves that had marked his last interview with that social critic our young man was among the guests. Mrs. Walker was one of those pilgrims from the younger world who, while in contact with the elder, make a point, in their own phrase, of studying European society; and she had on this occasion collected several specimens of diversely-born humanity to serve, as might be, for text-books. When Winterbourne arrived the little person he desired most to find wasn’t there; but in a few moments he saw Mrs. Miller come in alone, very shyly and ruefully. This lady’s hair, above the dead waste of her temples, was more frizzled than ever. As she approached their hostess Winterbourne also drew near.

  “You see I’ve come all alone,” said Daisy’s unsupported parent. “I’m so frightened I don’t know what to do; it’s the first time I’ve ever been to a party alone—especially in this country. I wanted to bring Randolph or Eugenio or some one, but Daisy just pushed me off by myself. I ain’t used to going round alone.”

  “And doesn’t your daughter intend to favour us with her society?” Mrs. Walker impressively enquired.

  “Well, Daisy’s all dressed,” Mrs. Miller testified with that accent of the dispassionate, if not of the philosophic, historian with which she always recorded the current incidents of her daughter’s career. “She got dressed on purpose before dinner. But she has a friend of hers there; that gentleman—the handsomest of the Italians—that she wanted to bring. They’ve got going at the piano—it seems as if they couldn’t leave off. Mr. Giovanelli does sing splendidly. But I guess they’ll come before very long,” Mrs. Miller hopefully concluded.

  “I’m sorry she should come—in that particular way,” Mrs. Walker permitted herself to observe.

  “Well, I told her there was no use in her getting dressed before dinner if she was going to wait three hours,” returned Daisy’s mamma. “I didn’t see the use of her putting on such a dress as that to sit round with Mr. Giovanelli.”

  “This is most horrible!” said Mrs. Walker, turning away and addressing herself to Winterbourne. “Elle s’affiche, la malheureuse.1 It’s her revenge for my having ventured to remonstrate with her. When she comes I shan’t speak to her.”

  Daisy came after eleven o’clock, but she wasn’t, on such an occasion, a young lady to wait to be spoken to. She rustled forward in radiant loveliness, smiling and chattering, carrying a large bouquet and attended by Mr. Giovanelli. Every one stopped talking and turned and looked at her while she floated up to Mrs. Walker. “I’m afraid you thought I never was coming, so I sent mother off to tell you. I wanted to make Mr. Giovanelli practise some things before he came; you know he sings beautifully, and I want you to ask him to sing. This is Mr. Giovanelli; you know I introduced him to you; he’s got the most lovely voice and he knows the most charming set of songs. I made him go over them this evening on purpose; we had the greatest time at the hotel.” Of all this Daisy delivered herself with the sweetest brightest loudest confidence, looking now at her hostess and now at all the room, while she gave a series of little pats, round her very white shoulders, to the edges of her dress. “Is there any one I know?” she as undiscourageably asked.

  “I think every one knows you!” said Mrs. Walker as with a grand intention; and she gave a very cursory greeting to Mr. Giovanelli. This gentleman bore himself gallantly; he smiled and bowed and showed his white teeth, he curled his moustaches and rolled his eyes and performed all the proper functions of a handsome Italian at an evening party. He sang, very prettily, half a dozen songs, though Mrs. Walker afterwards declared that she had been quite unable to find out who asked him. It was apparently not Daisy who had set him in motion—this young lady being seated a distance from the piano and though she had publicly, as it were, professed herself his musical patroness or guarantor, giving herself to gay and audible discourse while he warbled.

  “It’s a pity these rooms are so small; we can’t dance,” she remarked to Winterbourne as if she had seen him five minutes before.

  “I’m not sorry we can’t dance,” he candidly returned. “I’m incapable of a step.”

  “Of course you’re incapable of a step,” the girl assented. “I should think your legs would be stiff cooped in there so much of the time in that victoria.”

  “Well, they were very restless there three days ago,” he amicably laughed; “all they really wanted was to dance attendance on you.”

  “Oh my other friend—my friend in need—stuck to me; he seems more at one with his limbs than you are—I’ll say that for him. But did you ever hear anything so cool,” Daisy demanded, “as Mrs. Walker’s wanting me to get into her carriage and drop poor Mr. Giovanelli, and under the pretext that it was proper? People have different ideas! It would have been most unkind; he had been talking about that walk for ten days.”

  “He shouldn’t have talked about it at all,” Winterbourne decided to make answer on this: “he would never have proposed to a young lady of this country to walk about the streets of Rome with him.”

  “About the streets?” she cried with her pretty stare. “Where then would he have proposed to her to walk? The Pincio ain’t the streets either, I guess; and I besides, thank goodness, am not a young lady of this country. The young ladies of this country have a dreadfully pokey time of it, by what I can discover; I don’t see why I should change my habits for such stupids.”

  “I’m afraid your habits are those of a ruthless flirt,” said Winterbourne with studied severity.

  “Of course they are!”—and she hoped, evidently, by the manner of it, to take his breath away. “I’m a fearful frightful flirt! Did you ever hear of nice girl that wasn’t? But I suppose you’ll tell me now I’m not a nice girl.”

  He remained grave indeed under the shock of her cynical profession. “You’re a very nice girl, but I wish you’d flirt with me, and me only.”

  “Ah thank you, thank you very much: you’re the last man I should think of flirting with. As I’ve had the pleasure of informing you, you’re too stiff.”

  “You say that too often,” he resentfully remarked.

  Daisy gave a delighted laugh. “If I could have the sweet hope of making you angry I’d say it again.”

  “Don’t do that—when I’m angry I’m stiffer than ever. But if you won’t flirt with me do cease at least to flirt with your friend at the piano. They don’t,” he declared as in full sympathy with “them,” “understand that sort of thing here.”

  “I thought they understood nothing else!” Daisy cried with startling world-knowledge.

  “Not in young unmarried women.”

  “It seems to me much more proper in young unmarried than in old married ones,” she retorted.

  “Well,” said Winterbourne, “when you deal with natives you must go by the custom of the country. American flirting is a purely American silliness; it has—in its ineptitude of innocence—no place in this system. So when you show yourself in public with Mr. Giovanelli and without your mother—”

  “Gracious, poor mother!”—and she made it beautifully unspeakable.

  Winterbourne had a touched sense for this, but it didn’t alter his attitude. “Though you may be flirting Mr. Giovanelli isn’t—he means something else.”

  “He isn’t preaching at any rate,” she returned. “And if you want very much to know, we’re neither of us flirting—not a little speck. We’re too good friends for that. We’re real intimate friends.”

  He was to continue to find her thus at moments inimitable. “Ah,” he then judged, “if you’re in love with each other it’s another affair altogether!”

  She had allowed him up to this point to speak so frankly that he had no thought of shocking her by the force of his logic; yet she now none the less immediately rose, blushing visibly and leaving him mentally to exclaim that the name of little American flirts was incoherence. “Mr. Giovanelli at least,” she answered, sparing but a single small queer glance for it, a queerer small glance, he felt, than he had ever yet had from her—“Mr. Giovanelli never says to me such very disagreeable things.”

  It had an effect on him—he stood staring. The subject of their contention had finished singing; he left the piano, and his recognition of what—a little awkwardly—didn’t take place in celebration of this might nevertheless have been an acclaimed operatic tenor’s series of repeated ducks before the curtain. So he bowed himself over to Daisy. “Won’t you come to the other room and have some tea?” he asked—offering Mrs. Walker’s slightly thin refreshment as he might have done all the kingdoms of the earth.

  Daisy at last turned on Winterbourne a more natural and calculable light. He was but the more muddled by it, however, since so inconsequent a smile made nothing clear—it seemed at the most to prove in her a sweetness and softness that reverted instinctively to the pardon of offences. “It has never occurred to Mr. Winterbourne to offer me any tea,” she said with her finest little intention of torment and triumph.

  “I’ve offered you excellent advice,” the young man permitted himself to growl.

  “I prefer weak tea!” cried Daisy, and she went off with the brilliant Giovanelli. She sat with him in the adjoining room, in the embrasure of the window, for the rest of the evening. There was an interesting performance at the piano, but neither of these conversers gave heed to it. When Daisy came to take leave of Mrs. Walker this lady conscientiously repaired the weakness of which she had been guilty at the moment of the girl’s arrival—she turned her back straight on Miss Miller and left her to depart with what grace she might. Winterbourne happened to be near the door; he saw it all. Daisy turned very pale and looked at her mother, but Mrs. Miller was humbly unconscious of any rupture of any law or of any deviation from any custom. She appeared indeed to have felt an incongruous impulse to draw attention to her own striking conformity. “Good-night, Mrs. Walker,” she said; “we’ve had a beautiful evening. You see if I let Daisy come to parties without me I don’t want her to go away without me.” Daisy turned away, looking with a small white prettiness, a blighted grace, at the circle near the door: Winterbourne saw that for the first moment she was too much shocked and puzzled even for indignation. He on his side was greatly touched.

  “That was very cruel,” he promptly remarked to Mrs. Walker.

  But this lady’s face was also as a stone. “She never enters my drawing-room again.”

  Since Winterbourne then, hereupon, was not to meet her in Mrs. Walker’s drawing-room he went as often as possible to Mrs. Miller’s hotel. The ladies were rarely at home, but when he found them the devoted Giovanelli was always present. Very often the glossy little Roman, serene in success, but not unduly presumptuous, occupied with Daisy alone the florid salon enjoyed by Eugenio’s care, Mrs. Miller being apparently ever of the opinion that discretion is the better part of solicitude. Winterbourne noted, at first with surprise, that Daisy on these occasions was neither embarrassed nor annoyed by his own entrance; but he presently began to feel that she had no more surprises for him and that he really liked, after all, not making out what she was “up to.” She showed no displeasure for the interruption of her tête-à-tête with Giovanelli; she could chatter as freshly and freely with two gentlemen as with one, and this easy flow had ever the same anomaly for her earlier friend that it was so free without availing itself of its freedom. Winterbourne reflected that if she was seriously interested in the Italian it was odd she shouldn’t take more trouble to preserve the sanctity of their interviews, and he liked her the better for her innocent-looking indifference and her inexhaustible gaiety. He could hardly have said why, but she struck him as a young person not formed for a troublesome jealousy. Smile at such a betrayal though the reader may, it was a fact with regard to the women who had hitherto interested him that, given certain contingencies, Winterbourne could see himself afraid—literally afraid—of these ladies. It pleased him to believe that even were twenty other things different and Daisy should love him and he should know it and like it, he would still never be afraid of Daisy. It must be added that this conviction was not altogether flattering to her: it represented that she was nothing every way if not light.

  But she was evidently very much interested in Giovanelli. She looked at him whenever he spoke; she was perpetually telling him to do this and to do that; she was constantly chaffing and abusing him. She appeared completely to have forgotten that her other friend had said anything to displease her at Mrs. Walker’s entertainment. One Sunday afternoon, having gone to Saint Peter’s with his aunt, Winterbourne became aware that the young woman held in horror by that lady was strolling about the great church under escort of her coxcomb of the Corso. It amused him, after a debate, to point out the exemplary pair—even at the cost, as it proved, of Mrs. Costello’s saying when she had taken them in through her eye-glass: “That’s what makes you so pensive in these days, eh?”