LITMIR.BIZ

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… and the eyes looked at her, always with that question in their blue depths – and the graceful head with its short, close curls bent towards her … the god, of course – they said he often came – and how his sweet curved lips smiled at her as he stood in that chequered ray of sunlight slanting through the heavy foliage overhead…

      And with a little sigh Bianca passed from dreaming into sleep; her face, with its crown of tawny gold hair, thrown into sharp relief by the red damask cushions of the chair on which she was sitting, and her lips parted in a slight smile.

      VII

      "Bianca is certainly a strange child," the Princess Montefiano was saying. "I confess I do not understand her; but then, I never did understand children."

      Baron d'Antin looked at his sister, and then he smiled a little satirically.

      "After all," he replied, "the fact is not surprising. You married too late in your life – or, shall we say, too late in your husband's life – but it does not matter! No, Bianca is decidedly not like other girls of her age, in certain ways. But I think, Jeanne, that you make a mistake in regarding her as a child. She seems to me to be a fairly well-developed young woman."

      "Physically so, perhaps," returned the princess.

      Her brother smiled again – not a very pleasant smile. Monsieur d'Antin was scarcely middle-aged, being a good many years younger than his sister. He was tall for a Belgian, and tolerably handsome, with well-cut, regular features, and iron-gray hair as yet fairly plentiful. But he was a man who looked as though he had "lived." His eyes had a worn, faded expression, which every now and then turned to a hard glitter when they became animated; and his small, well-shaped hands were apt to move restlessly, as though their owner's nerves were not always in the best of order.

      "Physically?" he repeated. "Precisely, my dear Jeanne. Physically, your step-daughter is – well, no longer a child, we will suppose. Some young man will probably suppose the same thing one of these days; and he will presumably not wish to confine himself to suppositions," and Monsieur d'Antin blinked his eyes interrogatively at his sister.

      During the last couple of years, Baron d'Antin had abandoned Brussels and Paris, where he had hitherto passed the greater part of his time, for Rome. He had certainly not chosen Rome as a place of residence on account of its worldly attractions, and its other claims to interest did not particularly appeal to him. As a matter of fact, Monsieur d'Antin found Rome exceedingly dull, as a city. It is, indeed, scarcely the capital that a man of pleasure would elect to live in. Now Monsieur d'Antin had certainly been a man of pleasure while his constitution and years had allowed him to be so, and he still liked amusing himself and being amused. Unfortunately, however, when necessity obliged him to pursue other pastimes with greater moderation, he had given way more and more to a passion for gambling, and he had left the larger portion of his patrimony in clubs, both in his own capital, in Paris, and in Nice. It was not unnatural, perhaps, that, on financial disaster overtaking him, he should have remembered his sister, the Princess of Montefiano, and have been seized with a desire to pass a season or two in Rome; and it had never, somehow or other, been quite convenient to return to Belgium or to Paris since.

      He had come to Rome, he told his acquaintances, to economize; which, in plainer language, meant to say that he had come there to live upon his sister. The princess, indeed, was not unconscious of the fact; but her brother carried out his intention with such unfailing tact and consideration that she had no excuse for resenting it.

      Monsieur d'Antin did not often invade the austere seclusion of Palazzo Acorari. It would, no doubt, have been more economical to breakfast and dine at his sister's table, when not bidden elsewhere, than to eat at a restaurant or club. But Monsieur d'Antin liked to be independent; and, moreover, the pious atmosphere of Palazzo Acorari did not at all appeal to him.

      His sister bored him, and her entourage bored him still more. It was infinitely more convenient every now and then to borrow sums of money from her to meet current expenses, on the tacit understanding that such loans would never be repaid, than to take up his abode in Palazzo Acorari, as the princess had at first more than once suggested he should do.

      Monsieur d'Antin was an egoist, pure and simple, but he could be a very agreeable egoist – so long as he was supplied with all he wanted. Fortunately, perhaps, for his popularity, his egoism was tempered by an almost imperturbable good-humor, which, as a rule, prevented it from ruffling the nerves of others.

      There are some men, and a great many women, who invariably succeed in obtaining what they want out of daily life. Their needs are trifling, possibly, but then life is made up of trifles – if one chooses to live only for the present. But to be a really successful egoist, it is necessary at all events to acquire a reputation for good-humor.

      Monsieur d'Antin had acquired this reputation in Rome, as he had acquired it elsewhere; and he was shrewd enough to make it one of his most useful possessions. Indeed, it was almost a pleasure to lose money to Monsieur d'Antin at cards, or to place at his disposal any convenience of which he might momentarily be in need, such was his invariable bonhomie in society. He had very soon made a place for himself in the Roman world, and in this it must be confessed that he had shown remarkable ingenuity. Had he arrived in the Eternal City possessed of ready money, it would have made no difference whether he was a Belgian gentleman or an English or American "bounder," for all Rome would have willingly allowed him to entertain it at the Grand Hotel or elsewhere, provided he got the right society women to "run him." But Baron d'Antin had arrived in Rome with no reputation at all, beyond that of being an elderly viveur who happened to be the brother of the Principessa di Montefiano. He had studied his ground, however, and it had not taken him long to come to the conclusion that an unofficial foreigner, to be a social success in modern Rome, must usually be either an adventurer or a snob, and that the two almost invariably went together. Being a gentleman in his own country, albeit in somewhat straitened circumstances, Monsieur d'Antin had at first been amazed at the apparent inability of the average Romans of society to distinguish between a foreigner, man or woman, who was well-bred and one who was not. Finally, he had come to the conclusion that good-breeding was not expected from the unofficial foreigner, nor, indeed, any other of the usual passports to society – but merely a supply of ready money and a proper appreciation of the condescension on the part of the Roman nobility in allowing it to be spent on their entertainment. This, however, was not a condition of affairs that suited Monsieur d'Antin's plans. He had come to Rome not to be lived upon by the society he found there, but to make that society useful to him. That he had done so was entirely due to his own social talents, and to his apparently amiable disposition. He had no need of the Palazzo Acorari, so far as his society and his food were concerned, for there were few evenings of the week during the winter and spring that he had not a dinner invitation; and if by any chance he had no engagement for that meal, there were various methods at his disposal of supplying the deficiency.

      Altogether, Baron d'Antin had become persona grata in Roman society, and in his good-humored, careless way he had deliberately laid himself out to be so, even waiving his prejudices and suppressing a certain nervous irritation which the Anglo-Saxon race generally produced in him, sufficiently to dine with its Roman members in their rented palaces.

      "My dear Jeanne," he would say to his sister, "you have no sense of humor – absolutely none at all. I dined the other night with some of my Anglo-Saxon friends – I should rather say that I passed some hours of the evening in eating and drinking with them. The wines were execrable – execrable! – and the man who poured them out told us their supposed dates. Some of them, I believe, had been purchased when Noah sold off his cellar after the subsidence of the flood – although, if I remember rightly, he liked his wine, and his – well, sacred history is more in your line than mine, Jeanne. In any case, it was very amusing – and when one looked at the fine old rooms – the mise en scène of the comedy, you know – it was more amusing still."

      But Monsieur d'Antin was much too shrewd to laugh at any of the component parts of the society he had determined to exploit. Had he wanted nothing out of it, as he frequently told himself, he could have afforded to laugh a good deal; and, being possessed of a very keen sense of humor, he would probably have done so. As it was, however, he concealed his amusement, or, at the most, allowed himself to give it rein when calling upon his sister,

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