eptible
pout, and said to Newman, rapidly: "I beg you to remain; I desire
this visit to be short." Newman said to himself, at this, that
Madame d'Outreville intended, after all, that they should discuss the
Bellegardes together.

The prince was a short, stout man, with a head disproportionately large.
He had a dusky complexion and a bushy eyebrow, beneath which his
eye wore a fixed and somewhat defiant expression; he seemed to be
challenging you to insinuate that he was top-heavy. The duchess, judging
from her charge to Newman, regarded him as a bore; but this was not
apparent from the unchecked flow of her conversation. She made a fresh
series of mots, characterized with great felicity the Italian intellect
and the taste of the figs at Sorrento, predicted the ultimate future of
the Italian kingdom (disgust with the brutal Sardinian rule and complete
reversion, throughout the peninsula, to the sacred sway of the Holy
Father), and, finally, gave a history of the love affairs of the
Princess X----. This narrative provoked some rectifications on the part
of the prince, who, as he said, pretended to know something about that
matter; and having satisfied himself that Newman was in no laughing
mood, either with regard to the size of his head or anything else, he
entered into the controversy with an animation for which the duchess,
when she set him down as a bore, could not have been prepared. The
sentimental vicissitudes of the Princess X----led to a discussion of the
heart history of Florentine nobility in general; the duchess had spent
five weeks in Florence and had gathered much information on the subject.
This was merged, in turn, in an examination of the Italian heart per se.
The duchess took a brilliantly heterodox view--thought it the least
susceptible organ of its kind that she had ever encountered, related
examples of its want of susceptibility, and at last declared that for
her the Italians were a people of ice. The prince became flame to refute
her, and his visit really proved charming. Newman was naturally out of
the conversation; he sat with his head a little on one side, watching
the interlocutors. The duchess, as she talked, frequently looked at him
with a smile, as if to intimate, in the charming manner of her nation,
that it lay only with him to say something very much to the point. But
he said nothing at all, and at last his thoughts began to wander. A
singular feeling came over him--a sudden sense of the fo