is little short of ridiculous, and it is by no means always harmless.
But no one found fault with Marcello for admiring his stepfather, and
the attachment was a source of constant satisfaction to his mother. In
her opinion Corbario was the handsomest, bravest, cleverest, and best of
men, and after watching him for some time even the disappointed gossips
were obliged to admit, though without superlatives, that he was a
good-looking fellow, a good sportsman, sufficiently well gifted, and of
excellent behaviour. There was the more merit in the admission, they
maintained, because they had been inclined to doubt the man, and had
accused him of marrying out of pure love of money. A keen judge of men
might have thought that his handsome features were almost too still and
too much like a mask, that his manner was so quiet as to be almost
expressionless, and that the soft intonation of his speech was almost
too monotonous to be natural. But all this was just what his wife
admired, and she encouraged her son to imitate it. His father had been a
man of quick impulses, weak to-day, strong to-morrow, restless, of
uncertain temper, easily enthusiastic and easily cast down, capable of
sudden emotions, and never able to conceal what he felt if he had cared
to do so. Marcello had inherited his father's character and his mother's
face, as often happens; but his unquiet disposition was tempered as yet
by a certain almost girlish docility, which had clung to him from
childhood as the result of being brought up almost entirely by the
mother he worshipped. And now, for the first time, comparing him with
her second husband, she realised the boy's girlishness, and wished him
to outgrow it. Her own ideal of what even a young man should be was as
unpractical as that of many thoroughly good and thoroughly unworldly
mothers. She wished her son to be a man at all points, and yet she
dreamed that he might remain a sort of glorified young girl; she desired
him to be well prepared to face the world when he grew up, and yet it
was her dearest wish that he might never know anything of the world's