-twenty, and wore the handsome
uniform of an artillery officer on the Staff. He had not liked the
Marchesa's remark, and the impatient little clink of his scabbard
against his spur only preceded his answer by a second.

'Happily for Angela,' he said, 'we are not in the studio of a
caricaturist.'

The Marchesa, who could be near-sighted on occasion, put up her
tortoiseshell-mounted eyeglass and looked at him aggressively; but as
he returned her gaze with steadiness, she soon turned away.

'You are extremely rude,' she said coldly.

For she herself made clever caricatures in water-colours, and she knew
what Giovanni meant. Angela's mother had been a very devout woman and
had died young, but had incurred the hatred of the Marchesa by
marrying the very man whom the latter had picked out for herself,
namely, the elder of two brothers, and the Marchesa had reluctantly
consented to marry the other, who had a much less high-sounding title
and a far smaller fortune. She had revenged herself in various small
ways, and had often turned her brother-in-law's wife to ridicule by
representing her as an ascetic mediaeval saint, in contorted attitudes
of ecstasy, with sunken cheeks and eyes like saucers full of ink. Like
many other people, Giovanni had seen some of these drawings, for the
resentful Marchesa had not destroyed them when the Princess
Chiaromonte died; but no one had yet been unkind enough to tell Angela
of their existence. The girl did not like her aunt by marriage, it was
true, but with a singularly simple and happy disposition, and a total
absence of vanity, she apparently possessed her mother's almost
saintly patience, and she bore the Marchesa's treatment with a
cheerful submission which exasperated the elder woman much more than
any show of temper could have done.

Just now, seeing that trouble of some sort was imminent, she made a
diversion by coming down from the low movable platform, on which her
chair had been placed for the sitting, and she spoke to the artist
while she studied her own portrait. Durand was a very thin man, and so
tall that Angela had to look very high to see his face as she stood
beside him.

'I could never be as good as the picture looks,' she said in English,
with a little laugh, 'nor so dreadfully in earnest! But it is very
nice of you to think that I might!'

'You will never be anything but good,' answered Filmore Durand, 'and
it's not necessarily dreadful to be in earnest about it.'