hat the Count and Countess Del Ferice became prominent persons in the
Roman world.

Ugo was a man of undoubted talent. By his own individual efforts, though
with small scruple as to the means he employed, he had raised himself
from obscurity to a very enviable position. He had only once in his life
been carried away by the weakness of a personal enmity, and he had been
made to pay heavily for his caprice. If Donna Tullia had abandoned him
when he was driven out of Rome by the influence of the Saracinesca, he
might have disappeared altogether from the scene. But she was an odd
compound of rashness and foresight, of belief and unbelief, and she had
at that time felt herself bound by an oath she dared not break, besides
being attached to him by a hatred of Giovanni Saracinesca almost as
great as his own. She had followed him and had married him without
hesitation; but she had kept the undivided possession of her fortune
while allowing him a liberal use of her income. In return, she claimed
a certain liberty of action when she chose to avail herself of it. She
would not be bound in the choice of her acquaintances nor criticised in
the measure of like or dislike she bestowed upon them. She was by no
means wholly bad, and if she had a harmless fancy now and then, she
required her husband to treat her as above suspicion. On the whole, the
arrangement worked very well. Del Ferice, on his part, was unswervingly
faithful to her in word and deed, for he exhibited in a high degree that
unfaltering constancy which is bred of a permanent, unalienable,
financial interest. Bad men are often clever, but if their cleverness is
of a superior order they rarely do anything bad. It is true that when
they yield to the pressure of necessity their wickedness surpasses that
of other men in the same degree as their intelligence. Not only honesty,
but all virtue collectively, is the best possible policy, provided that
the politician can handle such a tremendous engine of evil as goodness
is in the hands of a thoroughly bad man.

Those who desired pecuniary accommodation of the bank in which Del
Ferice had an interest, had no better friend than he. His power with the
directors seemed to be as boundless as his desire to assist the
borrower. But he was helpless to prevent the foreclosure of a mortgage,
and had been moved almost to tears in the expression of his sympathy
with the debtor and of his horror at the hard-heartedness shown by his
partners.