Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 2.djvu/22

 of an obligation or an interdict to her ill-starred connection with an ignorant and superstitious Italian race whom she despised for their provinciality, their parsimony and their tiresomeness (she thought their talk the climax of puerility), and whose fatuous conception of their importance in the great modern world she had on various public occasions sufficiently covered with her derision. The old lady finally contented herself with remarking, 'Dear Prince, your wife is a very proud woman.'

'Ah, how could my wife be anything else? But her pride is not my pride. And she has such ideas, such opinions! Some of them are monstrous.'

Madame Grandoni smiled. 'She doesn't think it so necessary to have them when you are not there.'

'Why then do you say that you enter into my fears—that you recognise the stories I have heard?'

I know not whether the good lady lost patience with his persistence; at all events, she broke out, with a certain sharpness, 'Understand this—understand this: Christina will never consider you—your name, your illustrious traditions—in any case in which she doesn't consider, much more, herself!'

The Prince appeared to study, for a moment, this somewhat ambiguous yet portentous phrase; then he slowly got up, with his hat in his hand, and walked about the room, softly, solemnly, as if he were suffering from his long thin feet. He stopped before one of the windows, and took another survey of South Street; then, turning, he suddenly inquired, in a voice into which he had evidently endeavoured to infuse a colder curiosity, 'Is she admired in this place? Does she see many people?'