"
"Beautiful? She 's beauty itself--she 's a revelation. I don't believe
she is living--she 's a phantasm, a vapor, an illusion!"
"The poodle," said Rowland, "is certainly alive."
"Nay, he too may be a grotesque phantom, like the black dog in Faust."
"I hope at least that the young lady has nothing in common with
Mephistopheles. She looked dangerous."
"If beauty is immoral, as people think at Northampton," said Roderick,
"she is the incarnation of evil. The mamma and the queer old gentleman,
moreover, are a pledge of her reality. Who are they all?"
"The Prince and Princess Ludovisi and the principessina," suggested
Rowland.
"There are no such people," said Roderick. "Besides, the little old man
is not the papa." Rowland smiled, wondering how he had ascertained
these facts, and the young sculptor went on. "The old man is a Roman, a
hanger-on of the mamma, a useful personage who now and then gets asked
to dinner. The ladies are foreigners, from some Northern country; I
won't say which."
"Perhaps from the State of Maine," said Rowland.
"No, she 's not an American, I 'll lay a wager on that.
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