be mischievous, a terrible
advantage over you at starting. If you mean to be silent, unpleasant,
and enwrapped in a gloomy contemplation of your own merits and wrongs,
don't blame _him_ if he spend his time at the Casino with his friend, or
somebody worse. I am quite sure you _mean_ to be unselfish, and you
fancy you are so, and all the rest of it, quite honestly; but, in real
truth, as I told you before, you are only an egotist. You would rather
keep this unhappy Piero on thorns beside you than see him enjoy himself
with other people. Now, I call that shockingly selfish; and if you go in
that spirit to Trouville he will soon begin to wish, my dear child, that
he had never had a fancy to come over to a London season. I can see you
so exactly! Too dignified to be cross, too offended to be companionable;
silent, reproachful, terrible!

* * * * *

_From the Lady Mary Bruton, Roches Noires, Trouville, to Mrs. D'Arcy,
British Embassy, Berlin._

July 15th.

... Among the new arrivals here are the San Zenone. You remember my
telling you of their marriage some six weeks ago. It was quite _the_
marriage of the season. They really were immensely in love with each
other, but that stupid month down in the country has done its usual
work. In a rainy June, too! Of course any poor Amorina would emerge from
his captivity bedraggled, dripping, and disenchanted. She is really very
pretty,--quite lovely, indeed,--but she looks fretful and dull; her
handsome husband, on the contrary, is as gay as a lark which has found
the door of its cage wide open one morning. There is here a great friend
of his, a Duchessa dell'Aquila Fulva. _She_ is very gay too; she is
always perfectly dressed, and chattering from morning to night in shrill
Italian or voluble French. She is the cynosure of all eyes as she goes
to swim in a rose-colored _maillot_, with an orange-and-gold Eastern
burnous flung about her artistically. She has that wonderful Venetian
coloring which can stand a contrast and glow of color which would simply
kill any other woman. She is very tall, and magnificently made, and yet
uncommonly graceful. Last night she was persuaded to dance a
_salterello_ with San Zenone at the Maison Persane, and it was
marvellous. They are both such handsome people, and threw such wonderful
_brio_, as they would call it, into the affair. The poor little, pretty
princess, looking as fair and as dull as a primrose in a shower,