control you join with
those who are talking and conspiring against me."

Roma continued to sit with a gloomy and defiant face.

"How am I to defend myself against the humiliations you put upon me in
your own mind? You give me no chance to defend myself. I cannot know
what others have told you. I know no more than you repeat to me, and
that is nothing at all."

Roma was biting her compressed lips and breathing audibly.

"How am I to defend myself against the humiliations I suffer in the
minds of the public? There is only one way, and that is to allow it to
be believed that, in spite of all appearances, you are still playing a
part, that you are going to all lengths to punish the enemy who traduced
you and publicly degraded you."

Roma tried to laugh, but the laugh was broken in her throat by a rising
sob.

"I have only to whisper that, dear friend, and society, at all events,
will credit it. Already it knows the very minute details of your life,
and it will believe that when you threw away every shred of propriety
and went to live in that man's apartment, it was only in order to play
the old part--shall I say the Scriptural part?--of possessing yourself
of _the inmost secrets of his soul_."

The clear, sharp whisper in which the Baron spoke his last words cut
Roma like a knife. She threw up her head with scorn.

"Let it believe what it likes," she said. "If society cares to think
that I have allowed my life to be turned upside down for the sake of
hatred, let it do so."

The Baron's secretary interrupted by opening the door.

"Nazzareno, Excellency," said the secretary.

"Ah! Let him come in," said the Baron. "You remember Nazzareno, Roma? My
steward at Albano?"

An elderly man with a bronzed face and shaggy eyebrows, bringing an
odour of the fields and the farmyard, was ushered into the room.

"Come in, Nazzareno! You've not forgotten Donna Roma? You planted a
rosebush on her first Roman birthday, you remember. It's a great tree by
this time, perhaps."

"It is, Excellency," said the steward, bowing and smiling, "and nearly
as full of bloom as the Signorina herself."

"Well, what news from Albano?"

The steward told a long story of operations on the estates--planting
birch in the top fields, and eucalyptus in the low meadow, fencing,
draining, and sowing.

"And ... and the Baroness?" said the Baron, turning over some papers.

"Ah! her Excellency is worse," said the old man. "The nurse and the
doct