With a strained intensity of tone, she suddenly demanded, "Aunt Eleanor,
tell me, supposing I had _wanted_ to marry Giovanni, would you have made
no protest?"
The princess answered thoughtfully: "I am glad you are not to marry
Giovanni--yes, I am glad. Yet even so, he might make a good husband."
Instantly the blood rushed to Nina's head, "Don't you love me more than
to let me risk a life of wretchedness?" she exclaimed, but the look in
her aunt's face brought from the girl an immediate apology, and
presently the princess said:
"I don't think I should want you to marry over here at all. At first I
hoped it might be possible--but I am afraid you would be unhappy. There
are plenty of girls who might be content, but not you!" The princess
took her sewing out of a near-by chest and began hemming a table cloth.
"You mean," said Nina, "that when one reads of the broken hearts and
lost illusions of Americans married to Europeans, the accounts _are_
true? Why did you not tell me before?"
"I don't know, dear. Probably because such accounts are, to me, purely
sensational writing--and yet at the bottom of them lies a certain amount
of truth. In the majority of such cases of wretchedness, if you sift out
the facts, you will wonder not so much at the outcome, as that such a
marriage could ever have taken place.
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