hem, must have
a pretty milliner's bill. Giacosa has turned up again, looking as if he
had been kept on ice at Ancona, for her return."

"What sort of education," Rowland asked, "do you imagine the mother's
adventures to have been for the daughter?"

"A strange school! But Mrs. Light told me, in Florence, that she had
given her child the education of a princess. In other words, I suppose,
she speaks three or four languages, and has read several hundred French
novels. Christina, I suspect, is very clever. When I saw her, I was
amazed at her beauty, and, certainly, if there is any truth in faces,
she ought to have the soul of an angel. Perhaps she has. I don't judge
her; she 's an extraordinary young person. She has been told twenty
times a day by her mother, since she was five years old, that she is a
beauty of beauties, that her face is her fortune, and that, if she plays
her cards, she may marry a duke. If she has not been fatally corrupted,
she is a very superior girl. My own impression is that she is a mixture
of good and bad, of ambition and indifference. Mrs. Light, having failed
to make her own fortune in matrimony, has transferred her hopes to her
daughter, and nursed them till they have become a kind of monomania. She
has a hobby, which she rides in secret; but some day she will let you
see it. I 'm sure that if you go in some evening unannounced, you will
find her scanning the tea-leaves in her cup, or telling her daughter's
fortune with a greasy pack of cards, preserved for the purpose. She
promises her a prince--a reigning prince. But if Mrs. Light is silly,
she is shrewd, too, and, lest considerations of state should deny
her prince the luxury of a love-match, she keeps on hand a few common
mortals. At the worst she would take a duke, an English lord, or even a
young American with a proper number of millions. The poor woman must be
rather uncomfortable. She is always building castles and knocking them
down again--always casting her nets and pulling them in. If her
daughter were less of a beauty, her transparent ambition would be very
ridiculous; but there is something in the girl, as one looks at her,
that seems to make it very possible she is marked out for one of those
wonderful romantic fortunes that history now and then relates. 'Who,
after all, was the Empress of the French?' Mrs. Light is forever saying.
'And beside Christina the Empress is a dowdy!'"

"And what does Christina say?"

"She makes no