l. He pardoned her childishness and
her little absurdities for the sake of her great good qualities. "My
dear Prince," she said to him one day, "do you know that I would throw
myself into the fire for you?"

"I am sure of it; but there would not be any great merit in your doing
so."

"And why not, please?"

"Because you would not run any risk of being burned. This must be so,
because you receive in your house a crowd of highly suspicious people,
and no one has ever suspected you yourself. You are a little salamander,
the prettiest salamander I ever met. You live in fire, and you have
neither upon your face nor your reputation the slightest little scorch."

"Then you think that my guests are"----

"Charming. Only, they are of two kinds: those whom I esteem, and who do
not amuse me--often; and those who amuse me, and whom I esteem--never."

"I suppose you will not come any more to the Rue Murillo, then?"

"Certainly I shall--to see you."

And it really was to see her that the Prince went to the Baroness
Dinati's, where his melancholy characteristics clashed with so many
worldly follies and extravagances. The Baroness seemed to have a
peculiar faculty in choosing extraordinary guests: Peruvians, formerly
dictators, now become insurance agents, or generals transformed into
salesmen for some wine house; Cuban chiefs half shot to pieces by
the Spaniards; Cretes exiled by the Turks; great personages from
Constantinople, escaped from the Sultan's silken bowstring, and
displaying proudly their red fez in Paris, where the opera permitted
them to continue their habits of polygamy; Americans, whose gold-mines
or petroleum-wells made them billionaires for a winter, only to go to
pieces and make them paupers the following summer; politicians out of a
place; unknown authors; misunderstood poets; painters of the future-in
short, the greater part of the people who were invited by Prince Andras
to his water-party, Baroness Dinati having pleaded for her friends and
obtained for them cards of invitation. It was a sort of ragout of real
and shady celebrities, an amusing, bustling crowd, half Bohemian, half
aristocratic, entirely cosmopolitan. Prince Andras remembered once
having dined with a staff officer of Garibaldi's army on one side of
him, and the Pope's nuncio on the other.

On a certain evening the Baroness was very anxious that the Prince
should not refuse her latest invitation.

"I am arranging a surprise for you," she