No--Pauline wouldn't. She turned from the proffered effigy with a disgust evidently surprising to the Marchesa, whose own prejudices were different, and who could grasp other people's only piece-meal, one at a time, like a lesson in mnemonics. "Oh, my boy doesn't do things by halves," the Marchesa averred, still feeling that the occasion was one for boasting. Pauline leaned back wearily. "I'm as sorry for you as I can be, Amalasuntha; but Michelangelo is not a baby, and if he can't be made to understand that a poor man who wants to spend money must first earn it--" "Oh, but he does, darling! Venturino and I have always dinned it into him. And last year he tried his best to marry that one-eyed Miss Oxbaum from Oregon, he really did." "I said _earn_," Pauline interposed. "We don't consider that marrying for money is earning it--" "Oh, mercy--don't you? Not sometimes?" breathed the Marchesa. "What I mean by earning is going into an office--is--" "Ah, just so! It was what I said to Dexter last night. It is what Venturino and I most long for: that Dexter should take Michelangelo into his office. That would solve every difficulty. And once Michelangelo is here I'm sure he will succeed. No one is more clever, you know: only, in Rome, young men are in greater danger--there are more temptations--" Pauline pursed her lips. "I suppose there are." But, since temptations are the privilege of metropolises, she thought it rather impertinent of Amalasuntha to suggest that there were more in a one-horse little place like Rome than in New York; though in a different mood she would have been the first to pronounce the Italian capital a sink of iniquity, and New York the model and prototype of the pure American city. All these contradictions, which usually sat lightly on her, made her head ache today, and she continued, nervously: "Take Michelangelo into his office! But what preparations has he had, what training? Has he ever studied for the law?" "No; I don't think he has, darling; but he _would_; I can promise you he would," the Marchesa declared, in the tone of one saying: "In such straits, he would become a street-cleaner."