"I never heard anything more despicable!" cried the young girl. "Money
and disposition! And what becomes of the heart?"

The Marchesa smiled and fanned herself.

"Young girls without experience cannot understand these things," she
said. "Wait till you are older."

"And lose what looks I have and the power to enjoy anything! And you say
that you are not forcing me into this marriage! And you try to think, or
to make me think, that it is all for the best, and all delightful and
all easy, when you are sacrificing me and my youth and my life and my
happiness to the mere idea of a better position in society--because poor
papa was a sulphur merchant and bought a title which was only confirmed
because he spent a million on a public charity--and every one knows
it--and the Count of San Miniato comes of people who have been high and
mighty gentlemen for six or seven hundred years, more or less. That is
your point of view, and you know it. But if I say that my father worked
hard to get what he got and deserved it, and was an honest man, and that
this great personage of San Miniato is a penniless gambler, who does not
know to-day where he will find pocket money for to-morrow, and has got
by a trick the fortune my father got by hard work--then you will not
like it. Then you will throw up your hands and cry 'Beatrice!' Then you
will tell me that he loves me to distraction, and you will even try to
make me think that I love him. It is all a miserable sham, mamma, a vile
miserable sham! Give it up. I have said that I will marry him, since it
appears that I have promised. But do not try to make me think that I am
marrying him of my own free will, or he marrying me out of
disinterested, pure, beautiful, upright affection!"

Having delivered herself of these particularly strong sentiments,
Beatrice was silent for a while. As for the Marchesa, she was either
too wise, or too lazy, to answer her daughter for the present and she
slowly fanned herself, lying quite still in her long chair, her eyes
half closed and her left hand hanging down beside her.

Indeed Beatrice, instead of becoming more reconciled with the situation
she had accepted, was growing more impatient and unhappy every day, as
she realised all that her marriage with San Miniato would mean during
the rest of her natural life. She had quite changed her mind about him,
and with natures like hers such sudden changes are often irrevocable.
She could not now understand how sh