"Who stole it?"
"I haven't the slightest idea. It was this way, Michael; it happened in my own home on the island of Naxos, and my sister Clelia and I were amusing ourselves with our cameras, dressing each other up and posing each other.
"And she dressed me—or rather almost un-dressed me—that way—isn't it enough to make a saint swear—for when I had developed the plate and had started to print, somebody stole the plate from the sill of the open window. And the next thing we knew about it was when all Europe was flooded with my picture under which was printed that dubious caption—'The Laughing Girl.' Can you imagine my astonishment and rage? Could anything more utterly horrid happen to a girl? Had I at least been fully dressed—but no: there I was in every shop window among actresses, queens, demi-mondaines, and dissipated dukes just as Clelia had posed me in the intimacy of our own rooms, all over jewels, some of me mercifully veiled in a silk scarf, audaciously at ease in my apparent effrontery—oh, Michael, it nearly killed me!"
"Didn't you do anything about it?"
"Indeed I did! But where these photographs were being printed we never could find out. All we were able to do was to forbid their importation into Italy."
"How did you manage that?" I asked curiously.
She hesitated, then carelessly: "We had some slight influence at court——"
"Influence?"
"Possibly it amounted to that," she said indifferently.
"You are known at court, Thusis?"