life. His
self-command is the most admirable worldly thing I have ever seen. What
made it beautiful was that one could feel in it a tragic suggestion as in
a great work of art."

She paused with an inscrutable smile that a great painter might have put
on the face of some symbolic figure for the speculation and wonder of
many generations. I said:

"I always thought that love for you could work great wonders. And now I
am certain."

"Are you trying to be ironic?" she said sadly and very much as a child
might have spoken.

"I don't know," I answered in a tone of the same simplicity. "I find it
very difficult to be generous."

"I, too," she said with a sort of funny eagerness. "I didn't treat him
very generously. Only I didn't say much more. I found I didn't care
what I said--and it would have been like throwing insults at a beautiful
composition. He was well inspired not to move. It has spared him some
disagreeable truths and perhaps I would even have said more than the
truth. I am not fair. I am no more fair than other people. I would
have been harsh. My very admiration was making me more angry. It's
ridiculous to say of a man got up in correct tailor clothes, but there
was a funereal grace in his attitude so that he might have been
reproduced in marble on a monument to some woman in one of those
atrocious Campo Santos: the bourgeois conception of an aristocratic
mourning lover. When I came to that conclusion I became glad that I was
angry or else I would have laughed right out before him."

"I have heard a woman say once, a woman of the people--do you hear me,
Dona Rita?--therefore deserving your attention, that one should never
laugh at love."

"My dear," she said gently, "I have been taught to laugh at most things
by a man who never laughed himself; but it's true that he never spoke of
love to me, love as a subject that is. So perhaps . . . But why?"

"Because (but maybe that old woman was crazy), because, she said, there
was death in the mockery of love."

Dona Rita moved slightly her beautiful shoulders and went on:

"I am glad, then, I didn't laugh. And I am also glad I said nothing
more. I was feeling so little generous that if I had known something
then of his mother's allusion to 'white geese' I would have advised him
to get one of them and lead it away on a beautiful blue ribbon. Mrs.
Blunt was wrong, you know, to be so scornful. A white goose is exactly
what her son wants. But