ter and sex.

This made me very unhappy, but from first to last Alma was in the
highest spirits. Everybody seemed to be in Rome that spring, and
everybody seemed to be known either to her or to my husband. For Alma's
sake we were invited everywhere, and thus we saw not only the life of
the foreign people of the hotels but that of a part (not the better
part) of the Roman aristocracy.

Alma was a great success. She had the homage of all the men, and being
understood to be rich, and having the gift of making every man believe
he was her special favourite, she was rarely without a group of Italian
noblemen about her chair.

With sharper eyes the Italian women saw that her real reckoning lay with
my husband, but they seemed to think no worse of her for that. They
seemed to think no worse of him either. It was nothing against him that,
having married me (as everybody appeared to know) for the settlement of
his financial difficulties, he had transferred his attentions, even on
his honeymoon, to this brilliant and alluring creature.

As for me, I was made to realise that I was a person of a different
class altogether. When people wished to be kind they called me
_spirituelle_, and when they were tempted to be the reverse they voted
me insipid.

As a result I became very miserable in this company, and I can well
believe that I may have seemed awkward and shy and stupid when I was in
some of their grey old palaces full of tapestry and bronze, for I
sometimes found the talk there so free (especially among the women) that
the poisoned jokes went quivering through me.

Things I had been taught to think sacred were so often derided that I
had to ask myself if it could be Rome, my holy and beloved Rome--this
city of license and unbelief.

But Alma was entirely happy, especially when the talk turned on conjugal
fidelity, and the faithful husband was held up to ridicule. This
happened very often in one house we used to go to--that of a Countess of
ancient family who was said to have her husband and her lover at either
side of her when she sat down to dinner.

She was a large and handsome person of middle age, with a great mass of
fair hair, and she gave me the feeling that in her case the body of a
woman was inhabited by the soul of a man.

She christened me her little Irish _bambino_, meaning her child; and one
night in her drawing-room, after dinner, before the men had joined us,
she called me to her side on the couch, lit