y high circle of the Hague, "the set." ...

Now, she laughed softly at all this, after that first family-evening,
sitting in her room at the hotel, while her boy slept.... Yes, Papa had
always smiled because De Staffelaer was so much in love with her; and
she herself had thought it delicious to be wooed by this diplomatist,
with his ribbons and stars, by this smiling, courtly man of sixty, who
did not look a day more than fifty. And, when he asked Papa for her
hand, she accepted him, very glad and happy, a little flushed and
triumphant, rather inclined to preen herself in the delectable
atmosphere of congratulation; she was now, thanks to De Staffelaer,
decidedly a member of "the set" and, at the same time, did not need "the
set" so very much, now that she was going to Rome, to spend her life in
circles such as that of the Quirinal and the "white" Roman world.... She
had attained her aim. She had a charming husband, not young, but none
the less passionately in love with her and vain, in his turn, of his
young and pretty wife. She had a title. She had money enough, even
though De Staffelaer's affairs were somewhat involved. She found the
Court balls at Rome more splendid than the routs at the Hague; she was
introduced to all sorts of great names. The Italian aristocracy, it is
true, was even more exclusive than that of the Hague; but she moved in a
brilliant circle of diplomatists and foreigners. Only, she was struck by
the fact that, abroad, the members of the _corps diplomatique_ were not
stared at so much as in the opera at the Hague or on the terrace at
Scheveningen. It almost annoyed her: she would have liked to be stared
at in her turn. But, in the society of a big capital like Rome, the wife
of the Netherlands minister, even though she was young and pretty and
well-dressed, was not so important a person as the Marquesa This, of the
Spanish Legation, or Mrs. This or the Freule That, of "the set," was at
the Hague. People did not stare at her, in Rome; and this was almost a
disappointment.... Besides, her increasing and often wounded vanity left
a certain void within her, a sense of boredom. De Staffelaer, ever
courtly, pleasant and in love, with the apprehensive love of an old man
for the young wife whom he is afraid lest he should soon cease to
attract, ended by irritating her and upsetting her nerves....

But this, at the time, was nothing more--nor anything more serious--than
boredom and vague discontent.... Sin