‘Who was that?’ she inquired, looking down and beginning to write on her card while she spoke. ‘I know his face, but I cannot remember his name.’
‘He is the steward of Montalto, Excellency, Signor Schmidt.’
‘Of course!’ exclaimed Teresa as if she now remembered perfectly.
She finished writing, gave the porter the card, and drove away, meditating on the fact that the steward of Montalto frequented a gambling den in Via Belsiana and spoke to ladies in the street. It also annoyed her to think that Monsieur de Maurienne had doubtless often played at the same table with such people, and had possibly won money from Signor Schmidt. Teresa was more sensitive on some points than on others.
Maria did not answer her written message. On the second day Teresa received a note in a large, stiff handwriting, unfamiliar to her.
Montalto had written himself, in very cold and formal terms, to request her not to put herself to the inconvenience of asking for the Countess again.
Nothing could have been plainer, and Teresa flushed angrily.
‘That is what one gets for defending one’s friends!’ she cried, in a rage.
But she remembered quite well that in her anxiety to defend Maria she had said a number of extremely disagreeable things about Montalto’s mother, which were also quite untrue. Some careful relation had doubtless repeated her observations to him, and now he refused to let her enter his house. She wondered rather flippantly what would happen if everything she had said in her life were repeated to the wrong people, and the idea was so amusing that she laughed at it. But she bore Montalto a lasting grudge from that day, and it pleased her to reflect that his steward spent spare hours in a gambling den and would probably rob him in the end. She would take great care to keep the secret, lest some one should warn him in time, but she would also do her best to meet Maria in some friend’s house, and would tell her what she thought of her behaviour. She felt the humiliation of having had her name sent down to the porter’s lodge as that of a person for whom the Countess was never at home. Such a thing had never happened to her before.