f that varied day came rushing back to Nina--Giovanni's
proposal, the revelation of his falseness, and the conversation with
Zoya which had given her the true key to him who had until then been
something of a mystery.

With a strained intensity of tone, she suddenly demanded, "Aunt Eleanor,
tell me, supposing I had _wanted_ to marry Giovanni, would you have made
no protest?"

The princess answered thoughtfully: "I am glad you are not to marry
Giovanni--yes, I am glad. Yet even so, he might make a good husband."

Instantly the blood rushed to Nina's head, "Don't you love me more than
to let me risk a life of wretchedness?" she exclaimed, but the look in
her aunt's face brought from the girl an immediate apology, and
presently the princess said:

"I don't think I should want you to marry over here at all. At first I
hoped it might be possible--but I am afraid you would be unhappy. There
are plenty of girls who might be content, but not you!" The princess
took her sewing out of a near-by chest and began hemming a table cloth.

"You mean," said Nina, "that when one reads of the broken hearts and
lost illusions of Americans married to Europeans, the accounts _are_
true? Why did you not tell me before?"

"I don't know, dear. Probably because such accounts are, to me, purely
sensational writing--and yet at the bottom of them lies a certain amount
of truth. In the majority of such cases of wretchedness, if you sift out
the facts, you will wonder not so much at the outcome, as that such a
marriage could ever have taken place. When it happens that a nice,
sweet, wholesome girl marries a disreputable nobleman, who is despised
from one end of Europe to the other, American parents seem to feel no
horror until she has become a mental, moral, and physical wreck. To us
over here it was unbelievable that a decent girl could think of
marrying him; that her parents could be so dazzled by the mere title of
'Lady' or 'Marquise' or 'Grafin' or 'Principessa' that they were willing
to give her into the keeping of an unspeakable cad, brute, or rake. Do
you think that it is the fault of Europe if such girls know nothing but
wretchedness?"

The princess paused, then continued: "On the other hand, if a girl
marries in Europe as good a man, regardless of his title, as the
American she would probably have chosen at home; and, above all--for
this is most essential--if she is adaptable enough to change herself
into a European, rather than to e