consequence, and after all, it's
as much my fault as his."

"What is your fault?"

"That he dislikes me so. I said a brutal thing to him when we first met,
that night at the Grassinis'."

"YOU said a brutal thing? That's hard to believe, Madonna."

"It was unintentional, of course, and I was very sorry. I said something
about people laughing at cripples, and he took it personally. It had
never occurred to me to think of him as a cripple; he is not so badly
deformed."

"Of course not. He has one shoulder higher than the other, and his
left arm is pretty badly disabled, but he's neither hunchbacked nor
clubfooted. As for his lameness, it isn't worth talking about."

"Anyway, he shivered all over and changed colour. Of course it was
horribly tactless of me, but it's odd he should be so sensitive. I
wonder if he has ever suffered from any cruel jokes of that kind."

"Much more likely to have perpetrated them, I should think. There's a
sort of internal brutality about that man, under all his fine manners,
that is perfectly sickening to me."

"Now, Cesare, that's downright unfair. I don't like him any more than
you do, but what is the use of making him out worse than he is? His
manner is a little affected and irritating--I expect he has been too
much lionized--and the everlasting smart speeches are dreadfully tiring;
but I don't believe he means any harm."

"I don't know what he means, but there's something not clean about a
man who sneers at everything. It fairly disgusted me the other day at
Fabrizi's debate to hear the way he cried down the reforms in Rome, just
as if he wanted to find a foul motive for everything."

Gemma sighed. "I am afraid I agreed better with him than with you on
that point," she said. "All you good people are so full of the most
delightful hopes and expectations; you are always ready to think that
if one well-meaning middle-aged gentleman happens to get elected Pope,
everything else will come right of itself. He has only got to throw open
the prison doors and give his blessing to everybody all round, and we
may expect the millennium within three months. You never seem able to
see that he can't set things right even if he would. It's the principle
of the thing that's wrong, not the behaviour of this man or that."

"What principle? The temporal power of the Pope?"

"Why that in particular? That's merely a part of the general wrong. The
bad principle is that any man should hold over anoth