g in life that interested him.

"Well? Is Aunt Eleanor's heart broken?"

"Perhaps not; but, even so, you and she are very different women. From
her girlhood she was more or less trained for the life she leads. She
went from a convent school to the house of a brother-in-law--in other
words, from one dependence to another. She is the type of woman who
weathers change and storm by bending to the wind."

"Aunt Eleanor! Hers is the strongest character I know!"

"Of course it is! But it is exactly because she is apparently
unresisting and pliant to surrounding conditions that her spirit is
unassailable. You, on the contrary, would snap in the first tempest! Or,
to change the simile, have you ever seen a young bull calf tied to a
tree, and, in a frantic effort to get loose, wind itself up tighter,
until its head was pulled close to the tree? That is exactly what you
would be over here. No girl has ever had her own way all her life more
than you! Believe me, you have no idea what it would mean to be tied to
a rope of convention that would tighten like a noose at any struggle on
your part. As the wife of a man like di Valdo, you would be bound by
endless petty formalities. Another thing--which your aunt has made me
realize--as an American, you would have to excel the Italians in dignity
in order to be thought to equal them. Things perfectly pardonable for
them would finish you. You need only take your aunt and Kate Masco for
your examples. Kate's behavior is not any worse than that of plenty of
the born countesses, even. But that's just it--she _isn't_ a countess
born, and her ways won't do! Your aunt, on the other hand, is '_grande
dame_' in every fiber of her being. Hardly another woman in Rome has her
graciousness and dignity. These qualities were hers, doubtless, from
the beginning, but you needn't tell me even she found it as easy to be a
princess as it would seem!"

Nina looked up at Derby in open-eyed amazement. "Gracious, John! I never
dreamed you were so observing! In a way, I imagine you are right, too.
But at least, if a woman has to follow conventions to earn a position
over here, that position is real and worth while when she does get it.
And a woman like Aunt Eleanor is far more appreciated here than she
would be at home."

"Humph!" was Derby's retort. "You needn't think that all the
appreciating of women is done in Italy, though the men at home may not
put things so gracefully as these over here, who have no