It began again to rain disastrously; the days were made up of downpours and squalls, to the great despair of the foreigners.

At night the Piazza Esedra was a fine sight from the hotel balcony. The arc lights reflected their glow in the lakes of rain beneath them, and the great jet of the fountain in the centre took on tones of blue and mother-of-pearl, where the rays of the electric light pierced through it.

In the hotel parlour one dance followed another. Everybody complained gaily of the bad weather.

Shortly before the middle of Lent there arrived a Parisian family at the hotel, composed of a mother with two daughters and a companion.

This family might be considered a representation of the entente cordiale. The mother was French, the widow first of a Spaniard, SeÑor Sandoval, by whom she had had one daughter, and then of an Englishman, Mr. Dawson, by whom she had had another.

Mme. Dawson was a fat, imposing lady, with tremendous brilliants in her ears and somewhat theatrical clothes; Mile. Sandoval, the elder daughter, was of Arab type, with black eyes, an aquiline nose, pale rose-coloured lips, and a malicious smile, full of mystery, as if it revealed restless and diabolical intentions.

Her half-sister, Mile. Dawson, was a contrast, being the perfect type of a grotesque Englishwoman, with a skin like a beet, and freckles.

The governess, Mile. Cadet, was not at all pretty, but she was gay and sprightly. These four women seated in the middle of the dining-room, a little stiff, a little out of temper, seemed, particularly the first few days, to defy anybody that might have wished to approach them. They replied coolly to the formal bows of the other guests, and none of them cared to take part in the dances.

The handsome Signor Carminatti shot incendiary glances at Mlle. de Sandoval; but she remained scornful; so one evening, as the Dawson family came out of the dining-room, the Neapolitan waved his hand toward them and said:

“I protestante della simpatia.”

CÆsar made much of this phrase, because it was apt, and he took it that Carminatti considered the ladies protestants against friendliness, because they had paid no attention to the charms that he displayed in their honour.

CONSEQUENCES OF THE RAIN

Two or three days later Mme. Dawson bowed to CÆsar on passing him in the hall, and asked him:

“Aren’t you Spanish?”

“Yes, madam.”

“But don’t you speak French?”

“Very little.”

“My daughter is Spanish too.”

“She is a perfect Spanish type.”

“Really?” asked the daughter referred to.

“Thoroughly.”

“Then I am happy.”

In the evening, after dinner, CÆsar again joined Mme. Dawson and began to talk with her. The Frenchwoman had a tendency to philosophize, to criticize, and to find out everything. She had no great capacity for admiration, and nothing she saw succeeded in dragging warm eulogies from her lips. There was none of the “bello! bellissimo!” of the Italian ladies in her talk, but a series of exact epithets.

Mme. Dawson had left all her capacity for admiration in France, and was visiting Italy for the purpose of arriving as soon as possible at the conclusion that there is no town like Paris, no nation like the French, and it didn’t matter much to CÆsar whether he agreed or denied it.

Mlle. de Sandoval had a great curiosity about things in Spain and an absurd idea about everything Spanish.

“It seems impossible,” thought CÆsar, “how stupid French people are about whatsoever is not French.”

Mlle. de Sandoval asked CÆsar a lot of questions, and finally, with an ironic gesture, said to him:

“You mustn’t let us keep you from going to talk with the Countess Brenda. She is looking over at you a great deal.”

CÆsar became a trifle dubious; indeed, the Countess was looking at him in a fixed and disdainful way.

“The Countess is a very intelligent woman,” said CÆsar; “I think you would all like her very much.”

Mme. Dawson said nothing; CÆsar rose, took his leave of the family, and went over to speak to the Countess and her daughter. She received him coldly. CÆsar thought he would stay long enough to be polite and then get away, when Carminatti, speaking to him in a very friendly way and calling him “mio caro,” asked him to introduce him to Mme. Dawson.

He did so, and when he had left the handsome Neapolitan leaning back in a chair beside the French ladies, he made the excuse that he had a letter to write, and said good-night.

“I see that you are an ogre,” said Mlle. de Sandoval.

“Do you want me for anything?”

“No, no; you may go when you choose.”

CÆsar repaired to his room.

“I don’t mind those people,” he said; “but if they think I am a man made for entertaining ladies, they are very clever.”

The next day Mme. Dawson talked with CÆsar very affably, and Mlle. de Sandoval made a few ironical remarks about his savage ways.

Of all the family CÆsar conceived that Mlle. Cadet was the most intelligent. She was a French country girl, very jovial, blond, with a turned-up nose, and on the whole insignificant looking. When she spoke, her voice had certain falsetto inflexions that were very comical.

Mlle. Cadet was on to everything the moment it happened. CÆsar asked her jokingly about the people in the hotel, and he was thunderstruck to find that she had discovered in three or four days who all the guests were and where they came from.

Mlle. Cadet also told him that Carminatti had sent an ardent declaration of love to the Sandoval girl the first day he saw her.

“The devil!” exclaimed CÆsar. “What an inflammable Neapolitan it is! And what did she reply?”

“What would she reply? Nothing.”

“As you are already familiar with everything going on here,” said CÆsar, “I am going to ask you a question: what is the noise in the court every night? I am always thinking of asking somebody.”

“Why, it is charging the accumulator of the lift,” replied Mlle. Cadet.

“You have relieved me from a terrible doubt which worried me.”

“I have never heard a noise,” said Mlle. de Sandoval, breaking into the conversation.

“That’s because your room is on the square,” CÆsar answered, “and the noise is in the court; on the poor side of the house.”

“Pshaw! There is no reason to complain,” remarked Mlle. Cadet, “if they give us a serenade.”

“Do you consider yourself poor?” Mlle. de Sandoval asked CÆsar, disdainfully.

“Yes, I consider myself poor, because I am.”

During the following days Mme. Dawson and her daughters were introduced to the rest of the people in the hotel, and became intimate with them. The “Contessina” Brenda and the San Martino girls made friends with the French girls, and the Neapolitan and his gentlemen friends flitted among them all.

The Countess Brenda at first behaved somewhat stiff with Mme. Dawson and her daughters, but later she little by little submitted and permitted them to be her friends.

She introduced the French ladies to the other ladies in the hotel; but doubtless her aristocratic ideas would not allow her to consider Mlle. Cadet a person worthy to be introduced, for whenever she got to her she acted as if she didn’t know her.

The governess, noticing this repeated contempt, would blush at it, and once she murmured, addressing CÆsar with tears ready to escape from her eyes:

“That’s a nice thing to do! Just because I am poor, I don’t think they ought to despise me.”

“Don’t pay any attention,” said CÆsar, quite aloud; “these middle-class people are often very rude.”

Mlle. de Sandoval gave CÆsar a look half startled and half reproving; and he explained, smiling:

“I was telling Mlle. Cadet a funny story.”

Mme. Dawson and her daughters soon became friends with the most distinguished persons in the hotel; only the Marchesa Sciacca, the Maltese, avoided them as if they inspired her with profound contempt.

In a few days the Countess Brenda and CÆsar’s friendship passed beyond the bonds of friendship; but in the course of time it cooled off again.

INFLUENCE OF THE INCLINATION OF THE EARTH’S AXIS ON WHAT IS CALLED LOVE

One evening, when the Countess Brenda’s daughter had left Rome to go with her father to a villa they owned in the North, the Countess and CÆsar had a long conversation in the salon. They were alone; a great tenor was singing at the Costanzi, and the whole hotel was at the theatre. The Countess chatted with CÆsar, she reclining in a chaise longue, and he seated in a low chair. That evening the Countess was feeling in a provocative humour, and she made fun of CÆsar’s mode of life and his ideas, not with the phrases and the manners of a great lady, but with the boldness and spice of a woman of the people.

The angle that the earth’s axis makes with the trajectory of the ecliptic, and which produces those absurd phenomena that we Spaniards call seasons, determined at that period the arrival of spring, and spring had no doubt shaken the Countess Brenda’s nerves.

Spring gave cooling inflexions to the lady’s voice and made her express herself with warmth and with a shamelessly libertine air.

No doubt the core of her personality was joyful, provoking, and somewhat licentious.

Her eyes flashed, and on her lips there was a sensual expression of challenge and mockery.

CÆsar, that evening, without knowing why, was dull at expressing himself, and depressed. Some of the Countess’s questions left him in a stupid unreadiness.

“Poor child; I am sorry for you,” she suddenly said.

“Why?”

“Because you are so weak; you have such an air of exhaustion. What do you do to make you like this? I am sure you ought to be given some sort of iron tonic, like the anaemic girls.”

“Do you really think I am so weak?” asked CÆsar.

“Isn’t it written all over you?”

“Well, anyway, I am stronger than you, Countess.”

“In a discussion, perhaps. But otherwise.... You have no strength except in your brains.”

“And in my hands. Give me your hand.”

The Countess gave him her hand and CÆsar pressed it tighter and tighter.

“You are strong after all,” she said.

“That is nothing. You wait,” and CÆsar squeezed the Countess’s hand until he made her give a sharp scream. A servant entered the salon. “It’s nothing,” said the Countess, getting up; “I seemed to have turned my foot.”

“I will take you to your room,” exclaimed CÆsar, offering her his arm.

“No, no. Thanks very much.”

“Yes. It has to be.”

“Then, all right,” she murmured, and added, “Now you frighten me.”

“Bah, you will get over that!” and CÆsar went into her room with her....

The next day CÆsar appeared in the salon looking as if he had been buried and dug up.

“What is the matter?” Mme. Dawson and her daughters asked him.

“Nothing; only I had a headache and I took a big dose of antipyrine.”

The relations of the Brenda lady and CÆsar soon cooled. Their temperaments were incompatible: there was no harmony between their imaginations or between their skins. In reality, the Countess, with all her romanticism, did not care for long and compromising liaisons, but for hotel adventures, which leave neither vivid memories nor deep imprints. CÆsar noted that despite her lyricism and her sentimental talk, there was a great deal of firmness in this plump woman, and a lack of sensitiveness.

Moreover, this woman, so little aristocratic in intimacy, had much vanity about stupid things and a great passion for jewelry; but what contributed most to making CÆsar feel a profound hatred for her was his discovering what good health she enjoyed. This good health seemed offensive to CÆsar, above all when he compared it to his own, to his weak nerves and his restless brain.

From considering her a spiritual and delicate lady he passed to considering her a powerful mare, which deserved no more than a whip and spurs.

The love-affair contributed to upsetting CÆsar and making him more sarcastic and biting. This spiritual ulceration of CÆsar’s profoundly astonished Mlle. Cadet.

One day a Roman aristocrat, nothing less than a prince, came to call on Mme. Dawson. He talked with her, with her daughters, and the Countess Brenda, and held forth about whether the hotels in Rome were full or empty, about the pensions, and the food in the restaurants, with a great wealth of details; afterwards he lamented that Mme. Dawson, as a relative of his, even though a very distant one, should have gone to a ricevimento at the French Embassy, and he boasted of belonging to the Black party in Rome.

When he was gone, Mlle. Cadet came over to CÆsar, who was sunk in an arm-chair gazing at the ceiling, and asked him:

“What did you think of the prince?”

“What prince?”

“The gentleman who was here talking a moment ago.”

“Ah, was he a prince?”

“Yes.”

“As he talked about nothing but hotels, I took him to be the proprietor of one.”

Mlle. Cadet told Mme. Dawson what CÆsar had said, and she and her daughters were amused at his error.