The Marchese raised his eyebrows expressively with the slightest shrug of his shoulders.
"You may doubt that of every modern woman!" he said--"Few are really 'fitting' for marriage nowadays. They want something different--something new!--God alone knows what they want!"
Don Aloysius sighed.
"Aye! God alone knows! And God alone will decide what to give them!"
"It must be something more 'sensational' than husband and children!" said Rivardi a trifle bitterly--"Only a primitive woman will care for these!"
The priest laid a gentle hand on his shoulder.
"Come, come! Do not be cynical, my son! I think with you that if anything can find an entrance to a woman's soul it is love--but the woman must be capable of loving. That is the difficulty with the little millionairess Royal. She is not capable!"
He uttered the last words slowly and with emphasis.
Rivardi gave him a quick searching glance.
"You seem to know that as a certainty"--he said, "How and why do you know it?"
Aloysius raised his eyes and looked straight ahead of him with a curious, far-off, yet searching intensity.
"I cannot tell you how or why"--he answered--"You would not believe me if I told you that sometimes in this wonderful world of ours, beings are born who are neither man nor woman, and who partake of a nature that is not so much human as elemental and ethereal--or might one not almost say, atmospheric? That is, though generated of flesh and blood, they are not altogether flesh and blood, but possess other untested and unproved essences mingled in their composition, of which as yet we can form no idea. We grope in utter ignorance of the greatest of mysteries--Life!--and with all our modern advancement, we are utterly unable to measure or to account for life's many and various manifestations. In the very early days of imaginative prophecy, the 'elemental' nature of certain beings was accepted by men accounted wise in their own time,--in the long ago discredited assertions of the Count de Gabalis and others of his mystic cult,--and I am not entirely sure that there does not exist some ground for their beliefs. Life is many-sided;--humanity can only be one facet of the diamond."
Giulio Rivardi had listened with surprised attention.
"You seem to imply then"--he said--"that this rich woman, Morgana Royal, is hardly a woman at all?--a kind of sexless creature incapable of love?"
"Incapable of the usual kind of so-called 'love'--yes!" answered Aloysius--"But of love in other forms I can say nothing, for I know nothing!--she may be capable of a passion deep and mysterious as life itself. But come!--we might talk all night and arrive no closer to the solving of this little feminine problem! You are fortunate in your vocation of artist and designer, to have been chosen by her to carry out her conceptions of structural and picturesque beauty--let the romance stay there!--and do not try to become the husband of a Sphinx!"