trous-eyed,
clear-skinned, smooth, lighting his cigarette at a candle, wondered why
one should not like him. He had his good qualities. Mere vitality is
one. Those points of conduct that called upon him the disdain of persons
more fastidious with regard to their actions, secret or revealed, than
he, were not productive, after all, of much harm....

With eyes narrowed, as when he was examining a face to paint it, Gerald
watched the handsome fellow in an animated cousinly dispute with
Francesca--with the result, really against his hope, of finding himself,
instead of aided by his effort of good-will to discover new virtues,
confirmed in his previous disesteem. He could make himself almost love
Charlie by picturing him afflicted, humiliated, sorrowful. But he could
not picture him sorrowful except for narrowly personal misfortunes, such
as poverty, sickness. One could not even be sure, with a face of so
little generosity or moral consciousness as Charlie's, that he would
under all circumstances be incapable of active malignity....

The latter thought Gerald had the justice to sweep aside with an
unspoken apology.

"Of course, you, Charlie, never could admit that a cousin and a female
might know better than you!" Francesca was contending noisily. "It
happens that I have lately looked up, with some care, the costumes of
the _trecento_...."

"My dear girl!" interrupted Charlie. "You will be insisting next that an
_incroyable_ is a Greek, or that creature, that sort of Italian
bandit who gave the disgusting roar, is a French marquis.... Lend me
your glass, will you? I think I see some one I know."

"It's Trix," he said after a moment, "making signs to us from the
Sartorio's box. They want us to come over. Come on, let's go."

Manlio and Gerald were again left alone in the silent company of the
pale coffee-with-milk-colored maid, who unnoticed crept nearer and
nearer the front of the box to peep at the brilliant house.

Gerald was beginning to think that Landini kept Mrs. Hawthorne rather
longer than was fair when the door opened to let them in, with Estelle
and Leslie and Percy and Doctor Baldwin, all laughing together.

"Well, have you intrigued any one?" Gerald asked Aurora.

"Me? Oh, _I_ wouldn't be up to any such pranks," she said. "Has any
one been intriguing you?"

"I haven't been down, Mrs. Hawthorne. I have stayed quietly here, hoping
to go down with you, if you will be so good, merely intriguing myself
mea