Then one day I received by post a copy of the Osservatore Romano, with a marked paragraph. It announced that the Contessa Bracca had been received into the Pious Community of Saint Veronica as a noble oblate.
Her letter, and that paragraph, cut from the Osservatore Romano, lie before me now, on my writing-table. Don’t ask me what I feel, as I look at them.
MERELY PLAYERS
I
My dear,” said the elder man, “as I’ve told you a thousand times, what you need is a love-affair with a red-haired woman.”
“Bother women,” said the younger man, “and hang love-affairs. Women are a pack of samenesses, and love-affairs are damnable iterations.”
They were seated at a round table, gay with glass and silver, fruit and wine, in a pretty, rather high-ceiled little grey-and-gold breakfast-room. The French window stood wide open to the soft June day. From the window you could step out upon a small balcony; the balcony overhung a terrace; and a broad flight of steps from the terrace led down into a garden. You could not perceive the boundaries of the garden; in all directions it offered an indefinite perspective, a landscape of green lawns and shadowy alleys, bright parterres of flowers, fountains, and tall bending trees.
I have spoken of the elder man and the younger, though really there could have been but a trifling disparity in their ages: the elder was perhaps thirty, the younger seven- or eight-and-twenty. In other respects, however, they were as unlike as unlike may be. Thirty was plump and rosy and full-blown, with a laughing good-humoured face, and merry big blue eyes; eight-and-twenty, thin, tall, and listless-looking, his face pale and aquiline, his eyes dark, morose. They had finished their coffee, and now the plump man was nibbling sweetmeats, which he selected with much careful discrimination from an assortment in a porcelain dish. The thin man was drinking something green, possibly chartreuse.