But he
wished to have nothing to do with the white angel if she were a fallen
angel. Such a one would be easy to know, to walk with and talk with,
whereas he might have found it difficult to make the acquaintance of a
conventionally brought up girl. Some men might have been glad to find
the heroine of a romantic adventure dining alone at a fashionable hotel
at Monte Carlo, in a sheath-like, low-cut dress and a hat of to-morrow's
fashion. But Prince Vanno Della Robbia was sick at heart, and dazed as
by a blow.
His father, Duca di Rienzi, had a strain of stern asceticism in his
nature, and even the impulsive, warm-hearted American mother could not
wholly redeem from gloom the cold palace in Rome and the dark fourteenth
century castle at Monte Della Robbia. Each of these natures had given
something to Vanno, and the differences were so strongly marked that his
elder brother had said, "to know Vanno was like knowing two men of
entirely opposite characters, each struggling for mastery over the
other." But even in his asceticism he was ardent. Whatever he did, he
did with passion and fervour, which he could laugh at as if from a
distance sometimes, but could not change. And his ideas of the right
life for women were not unlike the ideas of eastern men. Women should be
guarded, kept apart from all that was evil or even unpleasant. So the
lovely American mother had been guarded, somewhat against her will, by
the Duke, and she had died while she was still young.
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