n absolute statement of
fact. But the trait was not disagreeable, for she herself was evidently
the foremost dupe of her inventions. She had a fictitious history
in which she believed much more fondly than in her real one, and an
infinite capacity for extemporized reminiscence adapted to the mood
of the hour. She liked to idealize herself, to take interesting and
picturesque attitudes to her own imagination; and the vivacity and
spontaneity of her character gave her, really, a starting-point in
experience; so that the many-colored flowers of fiction which blossomed
in her talk were not so much perversions, as sympathetic exaggerations,
of fact. And Rowland felt that whatever she said of herself might have
been, under the imagined circumstances; impulse was there, audacity, the
restless, questioning temperament. "I am afraid I am sadly prosaic,"
he said, "for in these many months now that I have been in Rome, I
have never ceased for a moment to look at Catholicism simply from the
outside. I don't see an opening as big as your finger-nail where I could
creep into it!"

"What do you believe?" asked Christina, looking at him. "Are you
religious?"

"I believe in God."

Christina let her beautiful eyes wander a while, and then gave a little
sigh. "You are much to be envied!"

"You, I imagine, in that line have nothing to envy me."

"Yes, I have. Rest!"

"You are too young to say that."

"I am not young; I have never been young! My mother took care of that. I
was a little wrinkled old woman at ten."

"I am afraid," said Rowland, in a moment, "that you are fond of painting
yourself in dark colors."

She looked at him a while in silence. "Do you wish," she demanded at
last, "to win my eternal gratitude? Prove to me that I am better than I
suppose."

"I should have first to know what you really suppose."

She shook her head. "It would n't do. You would be horrified to learn
even the things I imagine about myself, and shocked at the knowledge of
evil displayed in my very mistakes."

"Well, then," said Rowland, "I will ask no questions. But, at a venture,
I promise you to catch you some day in the act of doing something very
good."

"Can it be, can it be," she asked, "that you too are trying to flatter
me? I thought you and I had fallen, from the first, into rather a
truth-speaking vein."

"Oh, I have not abandoned it!" said Rowland; and he determined, since he
had the credit of homely directness, to push his ad