Page:The Princess Casamassima (London and New York, Macmillan & Co., 1886), Volume 2.djvu/51

 less fantastic. At the bottom, then, of much that she does is the fact that she is ashamed of having married you.'

'Less fantastic?' the young man repeated, staring.

'You may say that there can be nothing more eccentric than that. But you know—or, if not, it isn't for want of her having told you—that the Princess considers that in the darkest hour of her life she sold herself for a title and a fortune. She regards her doing so as such a horrible piece of frivolity that she can never, for the rest of her days, be serious enough to make up for it.'

'Yes, I know that she pretends to have been forced. And does she think she's so serious now?'

'The young man you saw the other day thinks so,' said the old woman, smiling. 'Sometimes she calls it by another name: she says she has thrown herself with passion into being "modern." That sums up the greatest number of things that you and your family are not.'

'Yes, we are not, thank God! Dio mio, Dio mio!' groaned the Prince. He seemed so exhausted by his reflections that he remained sitting in his chair after his companion, lifting her crumpled corpulence out of her own, had proposed that they should walk about a little. She had no ill-nature, but she had already noticed that whenever she was with Christina's husband the current of conversation made her, as she phrased it, bump against him. After administering these small shocks she always steered away, and now, the Prince having at last got up and offered her his arm, she tried again to talk with him of things he could consider without bitterness. She asked him about the health and habits of his uncles, and he replied, for the moment, with the minuteness which he had been taught