"Young girls without experience cannot understand these things," she
said. "Wait till you are older."
"And lose what looks I have and the power to enjoy anything! And you say
that you are not forcing me into this marriage! And you try to think, or
to make me think, that it is all for the best, and all delightful and
all easy, when you are sacrificing me and my youth and my life and my
happiness to the mere idea of a better position in society--because poor
papa was a sulphur merchant and bought a title which was only confirmed
because he spent a million on a public charity--and every one knows
it--and the Count of San Miniato comes of people who have been high and
mighty gentlemen for six or seven hundred years, more or less. That is
your point of view, and you know it. But if I say that my father worked
hard to get what he got and deserved it, and was an honest man, and that
this great personage of San Miniato is a penniless gambler, who does not
know to-day where he will find pocket money for to-morrow, and has got
by a trick the fortune my father got by hard work--then you will not
like it. Then you will throw up your hands and cry 'Beatrice!' Then you
will tell me that he loves me to distraction, and you will even try to
make me think that I love him.
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