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Updated: May 4, 2025
The man absolutely summed up all that Lavinia had dreamed of a romantic and masterful personage. She felt convinced that he had destroyed her life's happiness no other man could ever appeal to her now; none other could satisfy the tumult he had aroused in her. This, she told herself, desperately miserable, was love. Gheta spoke of her, for the three turned to regard her.
A rich chord of strings vibrated through the night, another followed, and then a brief pattern of sound was woven from the serious notes of a guitar. Lavinia shrank back within the room it was, incredibly, a serenade on the stolid Lungarno. It was for Gheta! The romance of the south of Spain had come to life under their window.
Although it was past the first of June, Gheta was wearing a linen suit of last year; and as her maid unpacked Lavinia saw the familiar pink tulle and the lavender gown with the gold velvet buttons. "Your dressmaker is very late," she observed thoughtlessly.
She wouldn't have dresses so fussy as Gheta's in figure, anyhow, she was perhaps her sister's superior fine materials, simply cut, with a ruffle at the throat and hem, a satin wrap pointed at the back, with a soft tassel.... Orsi was talking to Gheta, and she was answering him with a brevity that had cast a shade of annoyance over the Marchese Sanviano's large features.
"He resembles a juggler." Lavinia elaborately masked her hot resentment at this fresh stupidity. She must not, she felt, allow Orsi to discover her feeling for Abrego y Mochales; that was a secret she must keep forever from the profane world. She would die, perhaps at a terribly advanced age, with it locked in her heart. But if Gheta married him she would go into a convent.
Anna was smoking, but Gheta had refused. Lavinia's feeling for her sister had changed from pity to total indifference. The elder had been an overbearing and thoughtless superior; and now, when Lavinia felt in some subtle inexplicable manner that Gheta was losing rank, her store of sympathy was small. Lavinia hoped that she would marry Orsi immediately and leave the field free for herself.
Lavinia, too, knew the dwelling well, for Sanviano and Pier Mantegazza had been intimate from their similar beginnings, and she had played there as a child. However, she had never been regularly asked with Gheta; and when that occurred Gheta indifferently delivered Anna Mantegazza's message and her mother acquiesced, Lavinia had a renewed sense of her growing importance.
Gheta was slender and round; her complexion had the flawless pallid bloom of a gardenia; her eyes and hair were dark, and her lips an enticing scarlet thread. Perhaps her chin was a trifle lacking in definition, her voice a little devoid of warmth; but those were minor defects in a person so precisely radiant.
Gheta glanced at her out of a cool superiority, but Anna Mantegazza nodded vigorously. "He would be a horrid person!" she affirmed. "How silly!" Gheta responded. "It's an art, like the opera; he's an artist in courage. Personally I find it rather fascinating. Most men are so so mild."
He spoke to her, and because she had comprehended nothing of his speech she smiled at him with an absent and illuminating charm. He smiled back, happy in her apparent pleasure; and his good-nature was so insistent that she was impelled to reward it with a remark. She thought, she said, that Gheta was particularly lovely this afternoon.
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