the first to mount the walls of
Lepante, with the star of the grand Doge Michel.

But one particular trait of character had always prevented her from
succeeding on that point. She could not bear ennui nor constraint, nor
had she any vanity. She was positive and impassioned, in the manner of
the men of wealth to whom their meditated--upon combinations serve
to assure the conditions of their pleasures. Never had Madame Steno
displayed diplomacy in the changes of her passions, and they had been
numerous before the arrival of Gorka, to whom she had remained faithful
two years, an almost incomprehensible thing! Never had she, save in her
own home, observed the slightest bounds when there was a question of
reaching the object of her desire. Moreover, she had not in Rome to
support her any member of the family to which she belonged, and she had
not joined either of the two sets into which, since 1870, the society of
the city was divided. Of too modern a mind and of a manner too bold, she
had not been received by the admirable woman who reigns at the Quirinal,
and who had managed to gather around her an atmosphere of such noble
elevation.

These causes would have brought about a sort of semi-ostracism, had the
Countess not applied herself to forming a salon of her own, the recruits
for which were almost altogether foreigners. The sight of new faces,
the variety of conversation, the freedom of manner, all in that moving
world, pleased the thirst for diversion which, in that puissant,
spontaneous, and almost manly immoral nature, was joined with very just
clear-sightedness. If Julien paused for a moment surprised at the door
of the hall, it was not, therefore, on finding it empty at the end of
the season; it was on beholding there, among the inmates, Peppino Ardea,
whom he had not met all winter. Truly, it was a strange time to appear
in new scenes when the hammer of the appraiser was already raised above
all which had been the pride and the splendor of his name. But the
grand-nephew of Urban VII, seated between sublime Fanny Hafner, in pale
blue, and pretty Alba Steno, in bright red, opposite Madame Maitland,
so graceful in her mauve toilette, had in no manner the air of a man
crushed by adversity.

The subdued light revealed his proud manly face, which had lost none
of its gay hauteur. His eyes, very black, very brilliant, and very
unsteady, seemed almost in the same glance to scorn and to smile, while
his mouth, beneath it