I talked this over one day, not long before my return to Ancona, with the Marchesa Gentilina, who was sufficiently free from prejudice to listen quietly to some of my remarks, and sometimes even to acquiesce in their justice. But on this last point she was not amenable to my reasoning.
“It is all very well, _carina_; in England, I daresay, it may answer. But your women are of a different temperament, and society is differently constituted. As long as parents have the right, as with us, of disposing of their daughters in the manner they think best suited for their eventual benefit, the less they learn beforehand of the tender passion, the better. There are reforms enough wanted amongst our political abuses, without seeking to introduce innovations into private life. The whole system must be changed, or else girls had better be left in their present ignorance and simplicity.”
“But, marchesa——! This from you, who are such an advocate for progress!”
“_Cosa volete?_ I do not think the warm hearts of our daughters of the south could read as phlegmatically as Englishwomen those tales in which love and courtship are ever, must ever, be predominant.”
“And if they could thereby learn to form a more exalted idea of what we tax you Italians as regarding in too common-place a light? If they were led to look upon marriage less as a worldly transaction than as a solemn compact, not to be lightly entered into, but to be lovingly and faithfully observed?”
“If, if, my dear Utopist! If, instead of all these fine results, you gave them glimpses of a liberty and privileges they could never know, and so ended by making them miserable? Take my own case for an example. I was sixteen. I had never left the convent for nine years; I was always dressed in cotton prints, of the simplest make and description, and thick leather shoes, with great soles, that clattered as I walked along the mouldy old corridors, or ran about with the other pupils in the formal alleys of the garden, of which the four frowning walls had so long constituted our horizon. My pursuits and acquirements had varied but little from what they were when I entered the convent; and to give you in one word the summary of the infantile guilelessness in which the _educande_ were presumed to exist, I had never seen the reflection of my own face except by stealth, in a little bit of looking-glass, about the size of a visiting-card, which I had coaxed my old nurse to bring me in one of her visits, and that we smuggled through the grating of the _parlatojo_ concealed between two slices of cake!