e was not; he was amused, and when at last I saw his
face it was running in rivulets from the laughter he could not restrain.

That was the end of all things, and when Alma came up to me, saying
everything that was affectionate and insincere, about her "poor dear
unfortunate Margaret Mary" (only women know how to wound each other so),
I brushed her aside, went off to my bedroom, and lay face down on the
sofa, feeling that I was utterly beaten and could fight no more.

Half an hour afterwards my husband came in, and though I did not look up
I heard him say, in a tone of indulgent sympathy that cut me to the
quick:

"You've been playing the wrong part, my child. A Madonna, yes, but a
Venus, no! It's not your _metier_."

"What's the good? What's the good? What's the good?" I asked myself.

I thought my heart was broken.

FORTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER

With inexpressible relief I heard the following day that we were to
leave for Rome immediately.

Alma was to go with us, but that did not matter to me in the least.
Outside the atmosphere of this place, so artificial, so unrelated to
nature, her power over my husband would be gone. Once in the Holy City
everything would be different. Alma would be different, I should be
different, above all my husband would be different. I should take him to
the churches and basilicas; I should show him the shrines and papal
processions, and he would see me in my true "part" at last!

But what a deep disappointment awaited me!

On reaching Rome we put up at a fashionable hotel in the new quarter of
the Ludovisi, and although that was only a few hundred yards from the
spot on which I had spent nine happy years it seemed to belong to
another world altogether. Instead of the church domes and the monastery
bells, there were the harsh clang of electric trams, the thrum and throb
of automobiles, the rattle of cars and the tramp of soldiers.

Then I realised that there were two Romes--an old Rome and a new one,
and that the Rome we had come to hardly differed from the Cairo we had
left behind.

There was the same varied company of people of all nations, English,
Americans, French, German; the same nomad tribes of the rich and
dissolute, pitching their tents season by season in the sunny resorts of
Europe; the same aimless society, the same debauch of fashion, the same
callous and wicked luxury, the same thirst for selfish pleasures, the
same busy idleness, the same corruption of charac