"Don't say that, dear Lady Perivale. You will have to refute the scandal, and show these people that they were fools to swallow it. Yes, I have heard the story—insisted upon as if it were gospel truth; and I don't believe a word of it. The man was seen, I dare say, and there was a woman with him; but the woman wasn't you."
"Not unless a woman could be in Italy and Algiers at the same time, Lady Morningside. I was living from November to April at my villa in the olive woods above Porto Maurizio."
"And you had English visitors comin' and goin', no doubt?"
"Not a living creature from England. I use up all my vitality in a London season, and I go to Italy to be alone with my spirit friends, the choicest, the dearest—Mozart, Mendelssohn, Shakespeare, Browning. I think one can hardly feel Browning's poetry out of Italy."
"That's a pity. I don't mean about Browning, though I do take half a page of his rigmarole sometimes with my early cup of tea, my only time for reading—but it's a pity that you hadn't some gossiping visitors who could go about tellin' everybody they were with you in Italy."
"I have my old servants, who travelled with me, and never had me out of their sight."
"Very useful if you wanted their evidence in a court of law; but you can't send them to fight your battle at tea-parties, as you could any woman friend—that clever Susan Rodney, for instance. You and she are such pals! Why wasn't she with you part of the time?"
"She cannot leave her pupils."
"Poor creature! Well, it's a hard case."
"It is less hard since I know there's one great lady who believes in me," said Grace, holding out her hand to the Marchioness in a gush of gratitude.