not the Albergo della Madonna. She
received us in her bedroom, for which she apologised charmingly--so
charmingly as to make it appear the most natural thing in the world to be
received by her in her bedroom. She remembered seeing me in the train,
and begged me to sit down. She had a visitor--a gentleman. It was the
gentleman who had paid for her luncheon in the restaurant-car. I was
introduced, and he was, as I had supposed, an accountant. The lady was
less elaborately clad than on the occasion of our previous meeting. Just
as her other costume was precisely what it should have been for a
restaurant-car, so this was precisely adapted to her present
surroundings. She evidently understood dress. And very pretty it was to
see her busying herself about the room, entertaining her guests and
playing with her little dog. He was not the only little dog she had ever
had. Her previous companion, who had been given her by a Neapolitan
gentleman, died, and she wept for six weeks and was inconsolable until
another friend gave her this one. She thought first of calling him
Vesuvio, which was the name of his predecessor, but could not bring
herself to do so. Then she had the inspiration to call him Etna, which
suited him better, because he was a trifle bigger; it was also a kind of
complimentary reference to her first love. While she told us this she
was making coffee with a spirit lamp on the chest of drawers. She had a
speciality for making coffee, and really it was quite drinkable.

She gave us the story of her life. She was the niece of a cardinal, in
whose person were accumulated all the apostolic virtues, and her mother
was a French lady of noble birth and almost incredible beauty, who, when
Mary, or Mery as she prefers to write it, was about two months old,
married the cardinal's coachman and had eleven more children. When one
draws a conclusion from insufficient data, it is always satisfactory to
discover, as one too seldom does, that one was right. I had been right
about the gentleman being an accountant, and here I was right again in my
surmise that the lady was exceptionally highly connected, so highly that
one could overlook her mother's mesalliance with the coachman. Her uncle
was only a bishop at the time of her birth, he became a cardinal soon
after Mery's mother married the coachman, and then he forced the coachman
to legitimise Mery, and in this way the coachman became Mery's legal
father; and all