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Updated: May 4, 2025
Gheta, she learned, had refused the morning chocolate and, with her maid, had collected and packed all her effects. Lavinia had no desire to see her. The situation now was past Gheta's mending. After luncheon Lavinia remained in her room, Nelli departed for Naples and Cesare joined her. It was evident that he was greatly disturbed; but he spoke to her evenly.
"You're a sensible girl," he proclaimed; "and extremely pretty in the bargain." He added this in an accent of profound surprise, as if she had suddenly grown presentable under his eyes. "In some ways," he went on, gathering conviction, "you are as handsome as Gheta."
Thank God," he added vigorously, "I waited! Well, I didn't; although, to be completely honest, I knew that it came to be expected. I could see the surprise in your father's face. It occurred to me afterward that if I had brought Gheta any embarrassment I'd like to do something in a small way, a sort of acknowledgment.
"My dear Lavinia!" she exclaimed, critically overlooking the other's preparations. "You look very appealing like a snowdrop; exactly. I should say the toilet for Sunday at the convent; but no longer appropriate outside. Really, I must speak to the marchesa parents are so slow to see the differences in their own family. Gheta has been a little overemphasized.
She spoke with a trivial satisfaction that jarred painfully on Lavinia's memory of the past night. Gheta calmly accepted the serenade as another tribute to her beauty; Lavinia could imagine what Anna Mantegazza and her sister would say, and they both seemed commonplace even a little vulgar to her acutely sensitive being.
It seemed to the former that the cab was an intolerable time passing; she wished to draw Gheta back, to cover her indiscretion from Anna Mantegazza's prying sight. She sighed with inexplicable relief when she saw that the man had driven beyond them and that he did not turn. A bull-fighter!
There was, she recognized, something essentially feminine in the saturnine bullfighter; his pride had been severely assaulted; and therefore he would be in his own, less subtle manner as dangerous as Gheta. Cesare's self-esteem, too, had been wounded in its most vulnerable place he had been insulted before her.
A possibility suddenly filled her with dread it was evident that the Spaniard was growing hourly more absorbed in Gheta, and the latter might Lavinia could not support the possibility of Abrego y Mochales married to her sister.
She wished, moving disconsolately under high painted ceilings through the semi- gloom of still formal chambers, that she was a recognized beauty free, like Gheta. The drawing-room, from which they had watched the afternoon procession, was in complete darkness, save for the luminous rectangle of the window they had occupied. Its drapery was still disarranged.
"I hope Mochales excuses you because of your greenness." "Youth isn't any longer your crime," Lavinia retorted at last. "That dress it would suit Anna Mantegazza; but you looked only indecent." "Perhaps you're right, Gheta," Lavinia said unexpectedly. "I'm going to bed now, please." Her balance, restored by sleep, was once more normal when she returned to the Lungarno.
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