ims from here. But I shall put them on their guard.
You are a blood-thirsty hyena. You like to collect hearts the way the
Red-skins did scalps."

"You mean coupons."

"No, hearts. You like to pretend to be simple, because you are wicked. I
will tell the Countess Brenda and her daughter."

"What are you going to tell them?"

"That you are wicked, that you have a hyena's heart, that you want to
ruin them."

"Don't tell them that, because it will make them fall in love with me. A
hyena-hearted man is always run after by the ladies."

"You are right. Come along, go to Naples with me."

"Is your husband such a terrible bore, little sister?"

"A little more cream and a little less impertinence, _bambino_," said
Laura, holding out her plate with a comic gesture.

Caesar burst out laughing, and after lunch he took Laura to the station
and remained in Rome alone. His two chief occupations consisted in
making love respectfully to the Countess Brenda and going to walk with
Preciozi.

The Countess Brenda was manifestly coming around; in the evening Caesar
would take a seat beside her and start a serious conversation about
religious and philosophical matters. The Countess was a well-educated
and religious woman; but beneath all her culture one could see the
ardent dark woman, still young, and with intense eyes.

Caesar made it a spiritual training to talk to the Countess. She often
turned the conversation to questions of love, and discussed them with
apparent keenness and insight, but it was evident that all her ideas
about love came out of novels. Beyond a doubt, her calm, vulgar husband
did not fill up the emptiness of her soul, because the Countess was
discontented and had a vague hope that somewhere, above or beneath
the commonplaces of the day, there was a mysterious region where the
ineffable reigned.

Caesar, who hadn't much faith in the ineffable, used to listen to her
with a certain amazement, as if the plump, strong woman had been a
visionary incapable of understanding reality.

In the daytime Caesar went walking with Preciozi and they talked of
their respective plans.

_SOLITARY WALKS_

Often Caesar went out alone, chewing the end of his thoughts as he
strolled in the streets, working out possible schemes of investments or
of politics.

When he got away from the main streets, he kept finding some corner at
every step that left him astonished at its fantastic, theatrical air.
Suddenly he would dis