'And not to have been there!' exclaimed Signora Gallenga. 'How unfortunate! And did Sangiorgio speak?'
'Yes, yes——'
But a 'hush' now circulated through the room. A robust lady, with a mighty bosom tightly cuirassed in red satin, with a broad, good-natured face, sang a moving romance by Tosti. She had undone her pelisse, throwing it back on her shoulders, and with her hands in her muff, her veil down on her eyes, quite serenely, without a single quiver in a line of her face, she poured out her lamentations in the music of the Abruzzan master. Donna Luisa, standing in the middle of the drawing-room among fifty ladies seated, listened with the polite attention of a hostess; but she was assailed by an uneasy feeling, since she observed that in the two adjoining parlours there were people—ladies waiting to come in. It was the most important reception of the season; in the drawing-room reigned the quiet of a hothouse and the sweet, sugary smell of a place where there are many women. Standing along the wall, encased in severe frock-coats, was a row of commanders, bald and silent, who had left the Court of Accounts at half-past four, of officials from the Treasury, of men from other Government offices. But they preserved the statuesque immobility of the bureaucratic make-up, the unwearying patience, the endless, incalculably long expectation by dint of which they passed from one grade to another, until they had forty years of service behind them; to them this reception was an infinitesimal fraction of the forty years of service.
A sigh of relief was audible; the romance was finished, and Luisa Catalani complimented the singer, who was smiling like the full moon. Then the hostess immediately left the room; there were seven or eight ladies in the next room.
'What was the Chamber like to-day?' asked a fair, pale-faced Minister's daughter, who had newly arrived.
'Very warm. I do not understand how our men keep from getting ill,' replied another, spreading out her fan by way of original illustration.
'Sangiorgio spoke very well,' murmured Signora Giroux, a little lady with white hair and a sweet smile—her ladyship of the Agricultural Department.
'He is from the South,' remarked Donna Luisa Catalani. 'Was there anyone in the diplomatic gallery?'
'Countess di Santaninfa and Countess di Malgra.'