"I don't like it," said Lily simply.
He stared at her for a moment, amazement and mortified vanity
struggling together in his face. Suddenly, a true Latin, he burst into
a rueful laugh at his own discomfiture.
"I believe you mean it! But then you really are as cold--as white--as
your own name-flower! You don't know what it is--to care?"
"But," said Lily, herself confused, "you always said that I
didn't--that I never----"
"One says these things! But I did not know it was so literally true----"
"Forgive me," he added very gently. "You are still only a child, after
all."
Lily justified his words better than she realized, by flushing
deeply with vexation. She had thought that he understood her, but
his understanding had been only the first move in the game, and she
realized, with something nearly allied to disappointment, that the
Italian was not the man to rouse her to any appreciation of subsequent
moves.
"It's just--not," she thought, and involuntarily the words added
themselves--"like Nicholas. He's--just not."
She was slightly relieved, upon the whole, when della Torre bade her a
whimsical farewell.
"I still think that I could have taught you something, had you been
willing to learn--but you are afraid. You will learn not to be afraid
of life, some day, and then----"
He made an expressive gesture.
"Am I afraid of life?" she said, rather surprised. "Yes, I think
perhaps I am. I think I have always been taught to be afraid of it."
"And I, I wanted to teach you to forget everything that you have been
taught! But it is never the teaching that matters--only the teacher.
You know what they say?"
He paused a moment dramatically, looking at her and smiling.
"_C'est le ton qui fait la musique._"
Lily remembered the words very often, after Giulio della Torre had
gone.
"Did you give our friend Spaghetti his marching orders?" Nicholas
made enquiry of her, his eyebrows raised in a significantly humorous
expression.
"I don't know that I did, exactly. He gave them to himself, I think."
"I thought he seemed a bit infatuated," said Nicholas complacently.
"Would you be angry if I told you that I--I did encourage him a little
bit?"
Nicholas roared with laughter.
His mirth was so spontaneous and so ludicrously inapposite to Lily's
own half-formed intention of making as sensational a confession as the
mildness of the facts allowed, that she could not help laughing with
him.
"But, Nicholas, I really am ashamed."
"Why, darling?"
He put his arm round her waist.
"Because one evening he--he told me I wasn't happy and I said it was
true."
It was that which had weighed upon her, with its implication of her
husband's inadequacy. The fact that she had allowed the Marchese to
tell her that he loved her, appeared to her to be relatively of no
importance.
"You shouldn't tell fibs," said Nicholas serenely.
Lily was silent from sheer disconcertment.
"What are you downcast about?" he asked affectionately. "I've been so
disgustingly busy lately, I haven't had any talks with my little wife.
That fellow didn't worry you, did he?"
"Not in himself," Lily said confusedly, making an effort to give her
real thoughts to her husband.
She was not surprised when he failed to follow her bungling attempt.
"Not in himself, eh? Well, he's a splendid fellow, della Torre, full of
brains, and I don't blame him if he got a little bit above his boots,
eh?"
She had scarcely ever heard Nicholas say a word in condemnation of
anyone, and although the thought touched her, she was also impatient of
his lack of discrimination.
"Nicholas, it was partly my own fault, that the Marchese thought that I
should like him to make love to me a little bit."
"Was it, by Jove!" Nicholas refused to take the matter at all seriously.
"You know, you're a very fascinating little person, my dear. You
mustn't be surprised if inflammable young foreigners lose their heads
from time to time. And you mustn't let it distress you, either. I can't
have you looking worried."
It was so evident that his whole solicitude was for herself alone, that
Lily felt a sudden rush of passionate gratitude and affection towards
him.
"Oh, Nicholas, how good you are to me!"
She raised her lips to his.
The disappointment that marriage had brought to her receded at such
moments.
She ceased to try to wrench from her relation with Nicholas a supreme
meaning which it could never hold.
She was content to feel his love for her, momentarily forgetting to
rebel at the poverty of the response that it awakened in herself,
content to know that he was content, and curiously relieved because she
could sincerely assure herself that she loved her husband.