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Page 33
"The most innocent!"
Winterbourne felt sore and angry. "Why the devil," he asked,
"did you take her to that fatal place?"
Mr. Giovanelli's urbanity was apparently imperturbable.
He looked on the ground a moment, and then he said, "For myself
I had no fear; and she wanted to go."
"That was no reason!" Winterbourne declared.
The subtle Roman again dropped his eyes. "If she had lived,
I should have got nothing. She would never have married me,
I am sure."
"She would never have married you?"
"For a moment I hoped so. But no. I am sure."
Winterbourne listened to him: he stood staring at the raw protuberance
among the April daisies. When he turned away again, Mr. Giovanelli,
with his light, slow step, had retired.
Winterbourne almost immediately left Rome; but the following
summer he again met his aunt, Mrs. Costello at Vevey.
Mrs. Costello was fond of Vevey. In the interval Winterbourne
had often thought of Daisy Miller and her mystifying manners.
One day he spoke of her to his aunt--said it was on his conscience
that he had done her injustice.
"I am sure I don't know," said Mrs. Costello. "How did your
injustice affect her?"
"She sent me a message before her death which I didn't
understand at the time; but I have understood it since.
She would have appreciated one's esteem."
"Is that a modest way," asked Mrs. Costello, "of saying that she would
have reciprocated one's affection?"
Winterbourne offered no answer to this question; but he presently said,
"You were right in that remark that you made last summer. I was booked
to make a mistake. I have lived too long in foreign parts."
Nevertheless, he went back to live at Geneva, whence there continue
to come the most contradictory accounts of his motives of sojourn:
a report that he is "studying" hard--an intimation that he is much
interested in a very clever foreign lady.
End of The Project Gutenberg Etext of Daisy Miller, by Henry James
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