Lunch was served in a dining room gay with tapestries representing scenes after the manner of Peter Loar. In the midst of these beautiful seventeenth-century grotesques, a brisk fire of wit and sarcasm soon began to flash and scintillate. The three ladies were in high spirits and prompt at repartee. Barbare la Viti laughed her sonorous masculine laugh, throwing back her handsome boyish head and making free play with her sparkling black eyes. Elena was in a more than usually brilliant vein, and impressed Andrea as being so far removed from him, so unfamiliar, so unconcerned, that he almost doubted whether yesterday's scene had not been all a dream. Ludovico Barbarisi and the Prince of Ferentino aided and abetted the ladies; Lord Heathfield entertained his 'young friend' by boring him to extinction with questions as to the coming sales and giving him minute details of a very rare edition of the Metamorphoses of Apuleius—Roma, 1469—in folio, which he had acquired a day or two ago for fifteen hundred and twenty lire. He broke off every now and then to watch Barbarella, and then that gleam of dementia would flash into his eyes, and his repulsive hands trembled strangely.
Andrea's irritation, disgust, and boredom at last reached such a pitch that he was unable to conceal his feelings.
'You seem out of spirits, Ugenta,' said the princess.
'Well, a little, perhaps—Miching Mallecho is ill.'
Barbarisi at once overwhelmed him with importunate questions about the horse's ailments; and then Lord Heathfield recommenced the story of the Metamorphoses from the beginning.
The Princess turned to her cousin. 'What do you think, Ludovico,' she said with a laugh, 'yesterday, at the concert, we surprised him in a flirtation with an Incognita!'
'So we did,' added Elena.
'An Incognita?' exclaimed Ludovico.
'Yes, but perhaps you can give us further information. She is the wife of the new Minister for Guatemala.'
'Aha—I know.'