"How could I endure to have that thing down-stairs stand as my idea, my sole idea, of you? And how could I bear to make you a gift, a sole gift, of a piece of work I do not respect? This may be worth no more,--I think differently,--but it is at least the best I can produce. It has my sanction. You, too, believe me, will prefer it to the other after a while." She shook her head a little disconsolately. "The other you can, if you must, keep in your drawing-room to make an agreeable spot of color," he went on, reversing their parts and trying to induce in her a lighter humor; "it has that perfectly legitimate use. In your drawing-room, you know, Auroretta, among the pictures of your choosing, it does not, in our Italian idiom, altogether disappear. This one you will keep out of sight, but will look at now and then, if you please; and I quite trust you, with time, to recognize that it was painted by some one who understood and honored you more than there was any evidence of his doing when he perpetrated, for a joke, that bonbon-box subject down-stairs." Mrs. Hawthorne, with soft and saddened eyes fixed on the portrait, again shook her head, sighing, "Poor thing!" "Not at all!" he protested almost peevishly. "Please not to suggest by pitying her that I have not represented there a fine, big, strong thing, built to stand up under anything! I could slay, with pleasure, at any time"--he diverged, carried away by a long-standing disgust,--"the pestiferous asses who call my things morbid. I am too careful to keep true to what I see. The difference between them--I mean the critics who call me morbid--and myself, is in the degree of sight." "Don't get excited, Geraldino!" she checked fumings which she did not entirely understand. "What I meant was that looking at her has made me think of all the things that have gone wrong with me in my whole life. Don't you call that a tribute? You couldn't have painted this picture if you hadn't suspected those things, and, honest, I don't see how you could suspect them. Ever since I came over here I've been so jolly. Seems to me I've been nothing but jolly. I've been having such a good time! How you could see under it, I don't know. As a matter of fact, I've always been jolly between-times. Give me half a chance, let me get out of the frying-pan, I'd be ready in a minute to go on a picnic. But I've not been spared my troubles, Geraldino; you were right there." At this reference to many sorrows, he found a thing to do more expressive than words. Sitting near each other as they were, he could reach her without rising; he bent forward and touched his lips commiseratingly to her hand. He might have known that it would bring her story, but he had not schemed for this, and, unwilling, yet eager, to hear, was a prey to compunctions on more than one ground when, after a little gulp and sniff, she burst forth: