"I think I understand you, Count Filgiatti," I said--There is something about the most insignificant proposal that makes one blush in a perfectly absurd way. I have never been able to get over it--"and I fear I must bring this interview to a close. I----" "Ah, it is too embarrassing for you! It is experience very new, very strange." "No," I said, regaining my composure, "not at all. But the fact is, Count Filgiatti, the transaction you propose doesn't appeal to me. It is too business-like to be sentimental, and too sentimental to be business-like. I'm sorry to seem disobliging, but I really couldn't make up my mind to marry a gentleman for his ancestors who are dead, even if he was willing to marry me for my income which may disappear. Poppa is very speculative. But I know there's a certain percentage of Americans who think a count with a family seat is about the only thing worth bringing away from Europe, now that we manufacture so much for ourselves, and if I meet any of them I'll bear you in mind." "_Upon my word!_" It was Mrs. Portheris, in the doorway behind us, just arrived from Siena. * * * * * I mentioned the matter to my parents, thinking it might amuse them, and it did. From a business point of view, however, poppa could not help feeling a certain amount of sympathy for the Count. "I hope, daughter," he said, "you didn't give him the ha-ha to his face." CHAPTER XIII. There is the very tenderness of desolation upon the Appian Way. To me it suggested nothing of the splendour of Roman villas and the tragedy of flying Emperors. It spoke only of itself, lying over the wide silence of the noon-day fields, historic doubtless, but noon-day certainly. Something lives upon the warm stretches of the Appian Way, something that talks of the eternal and unchangeable, and yet has the pathos of the fragmentary and the lost. Perhaps it is the ghost of a genius that has failed of reincarnation, and inspires the weeds and the leaf-shadows instead. Thinking of it, one remembers only an almond tree in flower, that grew beside a ruined arch by the wayside--both quite alone in the sunlight--and perhaps of a meek, young, marble Cecilia, unquestioningly prostrate, submissive to the axe.