‘Oh, I wasn’t going to slander him,’ the young man expostulated a trifle sheepishly. ‘The only thing I have against Sybert is the fact that my conversation bores him.’
Marcia laughed with a certain sense of fellow-feeling.
‘Say anything you please,’ she repeated cordially. ‘My conversation bores him too.’
‘Well, what I was going to say is that he has had about all the Roman politics that are good for him. If he doesn’t look out, he’ll be getting in too deep.’
‘Too deep?’ she queried.
It was Dessart who pursued the subject with just a touch of malice. Laurence Sybert, apparently, was not so popular a person as a diplomat should be.
‘He’s lived in Rome a good many years, and people are beginning to wonder what he’s up to. The Embassy does very well for a blind, for he doesn’t take any more interest in it than he does in whether or not Tammany runs New York. All that Sybert knows anything about or cares anything about is Italian politics, and there are some who think that he knows a good sight more about them than he ought. He’s in with the Church party, in with the Government—first friends with the Right, and then with the Left.’
‘Monsieur Sybert is what you call an eclectic,’ suggested Benoit. ‘He chooses the best of each.’
‘I’m not so sure of that,’ Dessart hinted darkly. ‘He’s interested in other factions besides the Vatican and the Quirinal. There are one or two pretty anarchistic societies in Rome, and I’ve heard it whispered——’
‘You don’t mean——’ she asked, with wide-open eyes.