anluca della Spina's, very youthful, scanty, curling, and so fair as
to be almost colourless.

She remembered that he had looked at her rather sadly, and had spoken
little and to no purpose, making futile remarks about juvenile
amusements, and one or two harmless little jokes which she had quite
forgotten, but to which he had referred at the next short meeting, at
some other house, on the corner of some other similar sofa. That was all
that she could call up out of her memories. She had thought him insipid.
Once she remembered distinctly that while he had been talking to her,
she had been watching Bianca Corleone's handsome brother, Gianforte,
whom she had seen only once before, and that when her companion had
asked her to agree with him, she had said 'yes,' without having the
least idea of what he had been saying. He had produced only a very
slight and transparent shadow amongst the figures of her recollections.
It was a severe tax on her credulity to try and believe that he was
dying for love of her. If it were true, she thought, why had he not had
the courage to make her understand it? The fact that the offer made by
his family had not been communicated to her might have been hard to
explain, but she was not disturbed for want of an explanation. She did
not care for the man in the least, and there might be fifty reasons why
her aunt and uncle should think him undesirable. On the whole, she
believed that Taquisara had enormously exaggerated the state of the
case. The Sicilian himself impressed her as singularly honest and bold,
but she was much more ready to believe that the friend who had sent him
might have interested views, than that Bosio Macomer, whom she liked and
admired, was anxious to get possession of her fortune.

Taquisara himself had struck her as something new in the way of a man,
of a sort such as she had never seen nor dreamt of, and her mind dwelt
long on the recollection of the interview. In some way which she could
not explain, she vaguely connected him with the book she was now
reading--the Bride of Lammermoor; in other words, he appeared to her in
the light of a romantic character, and the first that had ever come
within the circle of her experience. His recklessness of formalities, of
all the limits supposed to be set upon the conversation of mere
acquaintance, of what she might or might not think of him individually,
so long as she would listen to what he had to say for his friend, seemed
to he