“They haven’t seen him and perhaps they won’t. But if they do it won’t matter, because here everything’s forgiven. That a person should be extraordinary in some way of his own—and a woman as much as a man—is all they want. A bookbinder will do as well as anything else.” The Prince mused a while. “How can she bear the dirt, the bad smell?” “I don’t know what you’re 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’re full of gin; their faces are awful, 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?” His friend looked at him a little sternly. “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’ll 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 didn’t admit his error and she doubted if he even saw 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’s better to conceal.” “It all depends on whether you’re afraid. Christina never is. Oh, I grant you she’s very perverse, and when the entertainment of watching her, to see how she’ll carry out some of her inspirations, is not stronger than anything else I lose all patience with her. When she doesn’t charm she can only exasperate. But, as regards yourself, since you’re here and I mayn’t 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 her seem to you a little less fantastic. At the bottom then of much that she does is the fact that she’s ashamed of having married you.” “Less fantastic?” the young man repeated, staring. “You may say that there can be nothing more extravagant—as even more insane—than that. But you know—or if not it isn’t for want of her having told you—how 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’t for the rest of her days be serious enough to make up for it.” “Yes, I know she pretends to have been forced. And does she think she’s so serious now?”