Mrs. Bellenden sailed past them on the arm of the English Ambassador while Susie expatiated.
It was her first appearance in Roman society, and she was the sensation of the evening.
A form as perfect as the Venus of the Capitol, a face of commanding beauty, a toilette of studied simplicity, a gown of dark green velvet, without a vestige of trimming, the dêcolletage audacious, and for ornament an emerald necklace in a Tiffany setting, which even among hereditary jewels challenged admiration, just a row of single emeralds clasping a throat of Parian marble.
Mrs. Bellenden had the men at her feet; from Ambassadors to callow striplings, new to Rome and to diplomacy, sprigs of good family, who were hardly allowed to do more than seal letters, or index a letter-book. All these courted her as if she had been royal; but the women who had known her in London kept themselves aloof somehow, except the American women, who praised and patronised her, or would have patronised, but for something in those dark violet eyes that stopped them.
"It isn't safe to say sarcastic things to a woman with eyes like hers," they told each other. "It would be as safe to try to take a rise out of a crouching tiger, or to put a cobra's back up, for larks."
Lady Susan was about the only woman of position who talked to Mrs. Bellenden; but Susie loved notorieties of all kinds, and had never kept aloof from speckled peaches, if the peaches were otherwise interesting.
"I call Bellenden a remarkable personality," she told Claude, whom she contrived to buttonhole for five minutes in the corridor after supper. "A rural parson's daughter, brought up on cabbages and the tithe pig. A woman who has spent a year in a lunatic asylum, and yet has brains enough to set the world at defiance. You will see she'll be a duchess—a pucker English duchess—before she has finished."
"She is more than worthy of the strawberry leaves; but I don't see where the pucker duke is to come from. Her only chance would be a fledgling, who had never crossed the Atlantic."
If her own sex persisted in a certain aloofness, Mrs. Bellenden had her court, and could afford to do without them. In the picture gallery, after supper, she was the centre of a circle, and her rich voice and joyous laughter sounded above all other voices in the after-midnight hour, when the crowd had thinned and most of the great ladies had gone away.