As I reflected thus I watched my fair hostess over the piano. She was eating with superhuman appetite, and seemed to be in no wise possessed by the idiotic mania which young ladies have of eating only in secret, and pressing their lips together at table with a sentimental air, as if they were of a nature superior to ours. Lord Byron had not yet introduced the fashion of lack of appetite among the fair sex. So that my capricious signora abandoned herself with all her heart to the enjoyment of feasting, and in a few moments she returned to me and took a fillet of hare and a pheasant's wing from the dismantled pie. She looked at me without a smile, and said sententiously: "This east wind gives me an appetite." "It seems that your ladyship is blessed with an excellent digestive apparatus," I observed. "If one had not a good stomach at fifteen," she replied, "it would be as well to throw up the sponge." "Fifteen!" I cried, looking at her closely and dropping my fork. "Fifteen years and two months," she replied, returning to her hassock with her freshly-filled plate; "my mother is not yet thirty-two, and she married again last year. Tell me, isn't it strange that a mother should marry before her daughter? To be sure, if my darling little mother had chosen to wait for me to be married, she would have had to wait a long while. Who would ever marry a girl who, although she is beautiful, is _stupid_ beyond anything one can imagine?" There was so much merriment and good-humor in the serious air with which she made fun of me; she was such a pretty _loustig_, that tall girl with the black eyes and the long curls falling over a neck as white as alabaster; her manner of sitting on her cushion was so graceful yet so chaste in its perfect naturalness, that all my suspicion and all my evil designs vanished. I had determined to empty the decanter of wine in order to put my scruples to sleep. I pushed the decanter away, and, having satisfied my appetite, rested my elbow on the piano and began to study her anew, and under a new aspect. That revelation as to her age had thrown all my ideas into confusion. When I have desired to form an opinion concerning a person, especially one of the fair sex, I have always considered it a matter of the utmost importance to ascertain that person's age as nearly as possible. Subtlety increases so rapidly in women that six months more or less often make the difference between the innocence which is deviltry and the deviltry which is innocence. Until then I had imagined that La Grimani was at least twenty years old. She was so tall and strong and dark, and there was so much self-assurance in her glance, in her bearing, in her every movement, that everybody made the same mistake at first sight. But on examining her more closely I realized my error. Her shoulders were broad and powerful, but her breast was still undeveloped. Although her whole attitude was womanly there