ch in love do not know exactly when they are
going to put the question, and are often surprised when it rises to
their lips. Cecilia considered that issue a foregone conclusion. The
vital matter was to find out her own answer.

She had never known any man, since her stepfather died, whom she liked
nearly as much as Guido, and she had met more interesting and gifted men
before she was really in society than most women ever know in a
lifetime. She liked him so much that if he had any faults she could not
see them, and she did not believe that he had any which deserved the
name. But that was not the question. No woman likes a man because he has
no faults; on the contrary, if he has a few, she thinks it will be her
mission to eradicate them, and reform him according to her ideal. She
believes that it will be easy, and she knows that it will be delightful
to succeed, because no other woman has succeeded before. That is one
reason why the wildest rakes are often loved by the best of women.

Cecilia liked Guido for his own sake, and felt an intellectual sympathy
for him which took the place of what she had sorely missed since her
stepfather died; she liked him also, because he was always ready to do
whatever she wished; and because, with the exception of that one day at
the Villa Madama, his moral attitude before her was one of respectful
and chivalrous devotion; and also because he and she were fond of the
same things, and because he took her seriously and never told her that
she was wasting time in trying to understand Kant and Fichte and Hegel,
though he possibly thought so; and she liked the little ways he had, and
his modesty, though he knew so much, and his simple manner of dressing,
and the colour of his hair, and a sort of very faint atmosphere of
Russian leather, good cigarettes, and Cologne water that was always
about him. There were a great many reasons why she was fond of him. For
instance, she had found that he never repeated to any one, not even to
Lamberti, a word of any conversation they had together; and if any one
at a dinner party or at a picnic attacked any favourite idea or theory
of hers, he defended it, using all her arguments as well as his own; and
when he knew she could say something clever in the general talk, he
always said something else which made it possible for her to bring out
her own speech, and he was always apparently just as much pleased with
it as if he had not heard it already, when they