“But the majority of our friends are old ladies, devout old ladies.”
“All the better.”
“All right. But if you come, it is on condition that you say nothing that would shock them.” “Surely.”
Cæsar accompanied the Countess Brenda and his sister to various aristocratic houses, and at every one he heard the same conversation, about the King, the Pope, the Cardinals, and how few or how many people there were in the hotels. These topics, together with slanders, constituted the favourite motive for conversation in the great world.
Cæsar conversed with the somewhat flaccid old ladies (“castanae molles,” as Preciozi called them) with perfect hypocrisy; he regarded the classic decorations of the salons, and while he listened to rather strange French and to most elegant and pure Italian, he wondered if there might be somebody among all this Papal society whom he could use to forward his ambitions.
Sometimes among the guests he would meet a young “monsignor,” discreetly smiling, whose emerald ring it was necessary to kiss. Cæsar would kiss it and say to himself: “Let us practise tolerance with our lips.”
In many of these salons the mania for the English game called “bridge” had caught with great violence.
Cæsar hated card-games. For a man who made a study of the stock-exchange, the mechanism of a card-game was too stupid to arouse any interest. But he had no objection to playing and losing.
The Countesses Brenda and San Martino had “bridge-mania” very hard, and they used to go to Brenda’s room in the evening to play.
After playing bridge a week, Cæsar found that his money was insensibly melting away.