ession of
his homage. Fanny, after introducing him to me, began at once on the
tale of my misconduct. He had a complexion of the cream-tint order, and
a moustache blacker than hate. He was a Florentine, I discovered, a
marquis with a name made up of v's, sonorous o's, and n's. We had found
a table, and Bunker ordered some ices. The night was really so perfect,
and the ice so good, that, like Mme. de Stael over her sherbet in
moonlit Venice, I almost wished it were a sin to sit there. The marquis
was in very good form and inclined to do the devoted on the slightest
provocation.

"'Is mademoiselle,' he asked me, 'is mademoiselle as disdainful of the
heart as she is of gold?'

"'Absolutely,' I answered--a remark which may have sounded snobbish, but
still was wholly true.

"'Ah!' he exclaimed, 'there are birds that do not sing untaught.'

"'You are beginning well,' I thought.

"The next day he lunched with us, and came again in the evening. In
addition to his marquisate, he had a fluty tenorino voice; what they
call a _voix de salon_. He sang all sorts of things for us, and he sang
them very well. When the air was lively he looked at Fanny, when it was
sentimental he looked at me. Thereafter I saw a great deal of him. One
day we would make up a party for Nice, on another we would go to San
Remo, or else back in the mountains, or to Grasse. Of course, as you
know, customs over there are such that he had no opportunity of being
alone with me, even for a second; but he had an art of making love in
public which must have been the result of long practice. It was both
open and discreet. It was not in words; it was in the inflection of the
voice and in the paying of the thousand and one little attentions which
foreigners perform so well. Now, to me, a tiara might be becoming, but
it is an ornament for which I have never felt the vaguest covetousness.
Moreover, I had no intention of marrying an Italian, however fabulous
the ancestry of that Italian might be. And, besides, the attentions of
which I was the apparent object were, I knew, addressed less to me than
to the blue eyes of my check-book. The Florentine nobleman who is
disposed to marry a dowerless American is yet to be heard from. This by
the way. However, I accepted the attentions with becoming grace, and
marked the cunning of his tricks. One evening he did not put in an
appearance, but at midnight, I heard, on the road before my window, the
tinkle of a guitar. I did