wer over other folks' labour, time, life,
happiness, and honour. And that, no doubt, is the reason that when the
irreproachable turn-out and perfect manners of pickpockets allow them to
mix freely in our select little gatherings, it is legitimate for a lady
to deck herself with artificial pearls and diamonds only to the exact
extent that she has real ones safely deposited at the bank. Let her look
younger and sound honester than perhaps answers to the precise reality;
there is no deception in all that. But think of the dishonourableness
of misleading other folk about one's income....

My soul was chastened by the seriousness of these reflections and by the
recognition of the moral difference between real stones and sham ones,
and I was in a very bad humour. Suddenly there came faint sounds of
guitars and a mandolin, and I remembered that the servants were giving a
ball at the other end of the house, and that it was Christmas Eve. I
rose from my table and opened the window, letting in the music with the
pure icy air. The night had become quite clear; and in its wintry blue
the big stars sparkled in a cluster between the branches of my pine
tree. They made me think of the circlet which Tintoret's Venus swoops
down with over the head of the ruddy Bacchus and rose-white Ariadne.
Those, also, I said to myself ill-humouredly, were probably stage
jewels.... I cannot account for the sudden train of associations this
word evoked: sweeping, magnificent gestures, star-like eyes, and a
goddess' brows shining through innumerable years; a bar or two of
melodious _ritornello_; an ineffable sense of poetry and grandeur,
and--but I am not sure--a note or two of a distant, distant voice.
Could it be Malibran--or Catalani ... and was my stage jewel bewitched,
a kind of Solomon's ring, conjuring up great spirits? All I can say is
that I have rarely spent a Christmas Eve like that one, while the
servants' ball was going on at the other end of the house, furbishing my
imitation diamonds with a silk handkerchief, alone, or perhaps not
alone, in my study.

MY BICYCLE AND I

We two were sitting together on the wintry Campagna grass; the rest of
the party, with their proud, tiresome horses, had disappeared beyond the
pale green undulations; their carriage had stayed at that castellated
bridge of the Anio. The great moist Roman sky, with its song of
invisible larks, arched all round; above the rejuvenated turf rustled
last year's silve