to say, coldly enough, that
if I had been disappointed we need not continue the discussion, and
this in spite of the fact that I believed her now to have in her
mind (however it had come there) what would have told her that my
disappointment was natural. But to my extreme surprise she ended by
observing: "If you don't think we have treated you well enough perhaps
we can discover some way of treating you better." This speech was
somehow so incongruous that it made me laugh again, and I excused myself
by saying that she talked as if I were a sulky boy, pouting in the
corner, to be "brought round." I had not a grain of complaint to
make; and could anything have exceeded Miss Tita's graciousness in
accompanying me a few nights before to the Piazza? At this the old woman
went on: "Well, you brought it on yourself!" And then in a different
tone, "She is a very nice girl." I assented cordially to this
proposition, and she expressed the hope that I did so not merely to be
obliging, but that I really liked her. Meanwhile I wondered still more
what Miss Bordereau was coming to. "Except for me, today," she said,
"she has not a relation in the world." Did she by describing her niece
as amiable and unencumbered wish to represent her as a parti?

It was perfectly true that I could not afford to go on with my rooms at
a fancy price and that I had already devoted to my undertaking almost
all the hard cash I had set apart for it. My patience and my time were
by no means exhausted, but I should be able to draw upon them only on a
more usual Venetian basis. I was willing to pay the venerable woman
with whom my pecuniary dealings were such a discord twice as much as any
other padrona di casa would have asked, but I was not willing to pay her
twenty times as much. I told her so plainly, and my plainness appeared
to have some success, for she exclaimed, "Very good; you have done what
I asked--you have made an offer!"

"Yes, but not for half a year. Only by the month."

"Oh, I must think of that then." She seemed disappointed that I would
not tie myself to a period, and I guessed that she wished both to secure
me and to discourage me; to say severely, "Do you dream that you can get
off with less than six months? Do you dream that even by the end of that
time you will be appreciably nearer your victory?" What was more in my
mind was that she had a fancy to play me the trick of making me engage
myself when in fact she had annihilated the pap