if she
were pleased.

"Yes. That is my firm opinion. Do you object to it?"

"Oh no!" Cecilia answered, still smiling sweetly. "You have just told me
that your opinions are worth so little that you never hesitate to change
them. So why in the world should I object to any of them?"

"Exactly," said Guido, unmoved. "Why should you? Especially as this
particular one gives me so much pleasure while it lasts."

"It will not last long, I daresay. Do you know that you are not at all
dull?"

"No one could be in your company."

"That is the first dull thing you have said this evening," Cecilia
answered, to see what he would say.

"Shall it be the last?" he asked.

"Yes, please."

There was a little wilful command in the tone that Guido liked. He felt
her presence in a way he did not remember to have felt that of any
woman, and in the atmosphere of her own in which she seemed to live he
breathed as one does in some very high places, less easily, perhaps, but
with conscious pleasure in drawing breath. He could not have described
his sensations in those first meetings with her, and he could have
analysed them less. One might as well seek the form and perfume of the
flower in the first tender shoot that thrusts up its joy of living out
of the mystery of the dull brown earth. Yet he knew well enough that
something was beginning to grow in him which had not begun, and grown,
and perished before.

Many times he had talked with women famous for their beauty, or for
their charm, or for their wit, and he himself had said clever things
which he had remembered with a little vanity or had forgotten with
regret, and had turned compliments in many manners, guessing at the
taste of her who sat beside him, wishing to please her, and wishing even
more to find some general key to women's thought, some universal
explanation of their ways, some logical solution of their seemingly
inconsequent actions. His mind was of the sort that is satisfied by
suspended judgment, that dreads the chillingly triumphant phrase of
reason, "which was to be proved," as much as the despairing tone of a
reduction to the impossible. He loved problems that could not be solved
easily, if at all, because he could think of them continually in a
hundred new and different ways. He hated equally a final affirmation
past appeal, and an ultimate negation which might make his thoughts
ridiculous in his own eyes. A quiet suspense was his natural state of
equilibrium. A