The Prince mused a while, and then he said, “How can she bear the dirt, the bad smell?” “I don’t know what you are talking about. If you mean the young man you saw at the house (I may tell you, by the way, that it was only the first time he had been there, and that the Princess had only seen him once)—if you mean the little bookbinder, he isn’t dirty, especially what we should call. The people of that kind, here, are not like our dear Romans. Every one has a sponge, as big as your head; you can see them in the shops.” “They are full of gin; their faces are purple,” said the Prince; after which he immediately asked, “If she had only seen him once, how could he have come into her drawing-room that way?” The old lady looked at him with a certain severity. “Believe, at least, what _I_ say, my poor friend! Never forget that this was how you spoiled your affairs most of all—by treating a person (and such a person!) as if, as a matter of course, she lied. Christina has many faults, but she hasn’t that one; that’s why I can live with her. She will speak the truth always.” It was plainly not agreeable to the Prince to be reminded so sharply of his greatest mistake, and he flushed a little as Madame Grandoni spoke. But he did not admit his error, and she doubted whether he even perceived it. At any rate he remarked rather grandly, like a man who has still a good deal to say for himself, “There are things it is better to conceal.” “It all depends on whether you are afraid. Christina never is. Oh, I admit that she is very strange, and when the entertainment of watching her, to see how she will carry out some of her inspirations, is not stronger than anything else, I lose all patience with her. When she doesn’t fascinate she can only exasperate. But, as regards yourself, since you are here, and as I may not see you again for a long time, or perhaps ever (at my age—I’m a hundred and twenty!), I may as well give you the key of certain parts of your wife’s conduct. It may make it seem to you a little less fantastic. At the bottom, then, of much that she does is the fact that she is ashamed of having married you.” “Less fantastic?” the young man repeated, staring. “You may say that there can be nothing more eccentric than that. But you know—or, if not, it isn’t for want of her having told you—that the Princess considers that in the darkest hour of her life she sold herself for a title and a fortune. She regards her doing so as such a horrible piece of frivolity that she can never, for the rest of her days, be serious enough to make up for it.” “Yes, I know that she pretends to have been forced. And does she think she’s so serious now?” “The young man you saw the other day thinks so,” said the old woman, smiling. “Sometimes she calls it by another name: she says she has thrown herself with passion into being ‘modern’. That sums up the greatest number of things that you and your family are not.”