"We were mere children," said Aurora, with the dignity of a grown
person. "That is all over."

"I wish it were not!" Marcello sighed.

"How silly you are!" observed Aurora, throwing back her beautiful head.
"But then, I am sure I am much more grown up than you are, though you
are nineteen, and I am not quite eighteen."

"You are seventeen," said Marcello firmly.

"I shall be eighteen on my next birthday!" retorted Aurora with warmth.
"Then we shall see who is the more grown up. I shall be in society, and
you--why, you will not even be out of the University."

She said this with the contempt which Marcello's extreme youth deserved.

"I am not going to the University."

"Then you will be a boy all your life. I always tell you so. Unless you
do what other people do, you will never grow up at all. You ought to be
among men by this time, instead of everlastingly at home, clinging to
your mother's skirts!"

A bright flush rose in Marcello's cheeks. He felt that he wanted to box
her ears, and for an instant he wished himself small again that he might
do it, though he remembered what a terrible fighter Aurora had been
when she was a little girl, and had preserved a vivid recollection of
her well-aimed slaps.

"Don't talk about my mother in that way," he said angrily.

"I'm not talking of her at all. She is a saint, and I love her very
much. But that is no reason why you should always be with her, as if
you were a girl! I don't suppose you mean to begin life as a saint
yourself, do you? You are rather young for that, you know."

"No," Marcello answered, feeling that he was not saying just the right
thing, but not knowing what to say. "And I am sure my mother does not
expect it of me, either," he added. "But that is no reason why you
should be so disagreeable."

He felt that he had been weak, and that he ought to say something sharp.
He knew very well that his mother believed it quite possible for a boy
to develop into saintship without passing through the intermediate state
of sinning manhood; and though his nature told him that he was not of
the temper that attains sanctity all at once, he felt that he owed to
his mother's hopes for him a sort of loyalty in which Aurora had made
him fail. The reasonings of innocent sentiment are more tortuous than
the wiles of the devil himself, and have amazing power to torment the
unfledged conscience of a boy brought up like Marcello.

Aurora's way of thinking was much mor