"Alas, Mademoiselle," said De Mauleon, rising to take leave, "your argument must rest without answer. I would not, if I could, confute the beautiful belief that belongs to youth, fusing into one rainbow all the tints that can colour the world. But the Signora Venosta will acknowledge the truth of an old saying expressed in every civilised language, but best, perhaps in that of the Florentine--'You might as well physic the dead as instruct the old.'" "But you are not old!" said the Venosta, with Florentine politeness,--" you! not a grey hair." "'Tis not by the grey of the hair that one knows the age of the heart," answered De Mauleon, in another paraphrase of Italian proverb, and he was gone. As he walked homeward, through deserted streets, Victor de Mauleon thought to himself, "Poor girl, how I pity her! married to a Gustave Rameau--married to any man--nothing in the nature of man, be he the best and the cleverest, can ever realise the dream of a girl who is pure and has genius. Ah, is not the converse true? What girl, the best and the cleverest, comes up to the ideal of even a commonplace man--if he ever dreamed of an ideal!" Then he paused, and in a moment or so afterwards his thought knew such questionings no more. It turned upon personalities, on stratagems and plots, on ambition. The man had more than his share of that peculiar susceptibility which is one of the characteristics of his countrymen-- susceptibility to immediate impulse--susceptibility to fleeting impressions. It was a key to many mysteries in his character when he owned his subjection to the influence of music, and in music recognised not the seraph's harp, but the siren's song. If you could have permanently fixed Victor de Mauleon in one of the good moments of his life--even now--some moment of exquisite kindness--of superb generosity --of dauntless courage--you would have secured a very rare specimen of noble humanity. But so to fix him was impossible. That impulse of the moment vanished the moment after; swept aside by the force of his very talents--talents concentrated by his intense sense of individuality--sense of wrongs or of rights--interests or objects personal to himself. He extended the royal saying, "_L'etat, c'est moi_," to words far more grandiloquent. "The universe, 'tis I." The Venosta would have understood him and smiled approvingly, if he had said with good-humoured laugh, "I dead, the world is dead!" That is an Italian proverb, and means much the same thing.