the George and Dragon hotel up in High Street. By Jove, Lotte, if I marry her, I’ll keep the public house myself—it’s just the life that suits me.’

‘What?’ said Madeline, ‘that vapid swarthy creature in the widow’s cap, who looked as though her clothes had been stuck on her back with a pitchfork!’ The signora never allowed any woman to be beautiful.

‘Instead of being vapid,’ said Lotte, ‘I call her a very lovely woman. She was by far the loveliest woman in the rooms the other night; that is, excepting you, Madeline.’

Even the compliment did not soften the asperity of the maimed beauty. ‘Every woman is charming according to Lotte,’ she said; ‘I never knew an eye with so little true appreciation. In the first place, what woman on earth could look well in such a thing as that she had on her head?’

‘Of course she wears a widow’s cap; but she’ll put that off when Bertie marries her.’

‘I don’t see any “of course” in it,’ said Madeline. ‘The death of twenty husbands should not make me undergo such a penance. It is as much a relic of paganism as the sacrifice of a Hindu woman at the burning of her husband’s body. If not so bloody, it is quite as barbarous, and quite as useless.’

‘But you don’t blame her for that,’ said Bertie. ‘She does it because it’s the custom of the country. People would think ill of her if she didn’t do it.’

‘Exactly,’ said Madeline. ‘She is just one of those English nonentities who would tie her head up in a bag for three months every summer, if her mother and her grandmother had tied up their heads before her. It would never occur to her, to think whether there was any use in submitting to such a nuisance.’

‘It’s very hard, in a country like England, for a young woman to set herself in opposition to the prejudices of that sort,’ said the prudent Charlotte.

‘What you mean is, that it’s very hard for a fool not to be a fool,’ said Madeline.

Bertie Stanhope had so much knocked about the world from his earliest years, that he had not retained much respect for the gravity of English customs; but even to his mind an idea presented itself, that, perhaps in a wife, true British prejudice would not in the long run be less agreeable than Anglo–Italian freedom from restraint. He did not exactly say so, but he expressed the idea in another way.

‘I fancy,’ said he, ‘that if I were to die, and then walk, I should think that my widow looked better in one of those caps than any other kind of head–dress.’

‘Yes—and you’d fancy also that she could do nothing better than shut herself up and cry for you, or else burn herself. But she would think differently. She’d probably wear one of those horrid she–helmets, because she’d want the courage not to do so; but she’d wear it with a heart longing for the time when she might be allowed to throw it off. I hate such shallow false pretences. For my part, I would let the world say what it pleased, and show no grief if I felt none;—and perhaps not, if I did.’

‘But wearing a widow’s cap won’t lessen her fortune,’ said Charlotte.

‘Or increase it,’ said Madeline. ‘Then why on earth does she do it?’

‘But Lotte’s object is to make her put it off,’ said Bertie.

‘If it be true that she has got twelve hundred a year quite at her own disposal, and she be not utterly vulgar in her manners, I would advise you to marry her. I dare say she is to be had for the asking; and as you are not going to marry her for love, it doesn’t much matter whether she is good–looking or not. As to your really marrying a woman for love, I don’t believe you are fool enough for that.’