Sansevero laughed. "What would you have? Are you becoming a Puritan miss, Leonora mia?" He shrugged his shoulders. "He is young and he has heart! Would you have for a nephew-in-law a St. Anthony?"
As the princess still looked worried, he seemed afraid that he had hurt his project. "Giovanni is of a type that women like," he said reassuringly, "and probably he has had his successes—that is all I meant. Don't be so suspicious! I want merely to further the interests of two young people who are in every way suited to each other. Giovanni may be an anchorite, for all I know."
Eleanor stood turning her wedding ring round and round on her finger. Then she looked anxiously into her husband's face. He was puffing at a cigarette that he had lighted, and his eyes looked back into hers with the perfectly innocent expression of a child's.
CHAPTER IX
A DOOR IS OPENED THAT GIOVANNI PREFERS TO KEEP CLOSED
The eyes of La Favorita boded good to no one! As a hostess her deportment left much to be desired, but since her visitors were limited to her very intimate friends it mattered, perhaps, little. At all events, as guest after guest arrived in her over-decorated salon, she looked up expectantly, and then resumed her expression of ugly indifference.
"Per Bacco!" she muttered quite audibly enough for one to overhear, "this crowd seems to think I have asked all Rome to supper!"
She attacked two young men of fashion as they entered. Fortunately, her manner somewhat modified the rudeness of her words—and the ill humor of her tone carried no conviction. "You cannot come in. I did not invite you! I have no room!"
Instead of being angry, one, the Count Rosso, answered her in a voice that was half jesting, half conciliatory, in the familiar second person singular: "But thou art quite mad, my dear! We were all asked at Zizi's supper. I, for one, call it very ungracious of you to try to dispense with our agreeable society."