in full evening dress reading to barefooted babies out of gingerly held
picture books. There were photographs of all varieties; big ones and
little ones, framed and unframed--the king and the queen with
crown-surmounted settings and boldly written first names, and "_A la
cara Eleanor_" inscribed above that of her majesty. In the other
photographs the signatures grew in complication and length as their
aristocratic importance diminished. Books and magazines littered the
tables; French, Italian, and English in indiscriminate association. A
workbasket of plain sewing lay open among the pillows on the sofa. An
American magazine, with a paper-knife inserted between its leaves, was
tossed beside a tooled morocco edition of Tacitus. A crucifix hung
beneath the Correggio; a plaster model of the Discobolus stood between
the windows.

And in the midst of old and new, religious and pagan, priceless and
insignificant, sat her Excellency, the ex-American beauty and present
chatelaine of the great family of the princes of the Sansevero, in a
golf skirt and walking boots, a plain starched shirtwaist and stock tie,
adding to the wrinkles in her forehead and in the corners of her eyes by
trying to figure out how, with forty thousand lire, she was going to pay
a debt of sixty thousand lire and have enough left over to open the
great palace in Rome, and realize a dream that had always been in her
heart--to take Nina out in Roman society, to give herself the delight of
showing Rome to Nina, and the greater delight of showing Nina to Rome.

She glanced up at two photographs, the only ones on her desk. The first
was of her husband, taken in the fancy costume of a troubadour, with the
signature "Sandro" across the lower half, in characters symbolical of
the song he might have sung, so gay and ascending was the handwriting.
The other picture was of a young woman in evening dress. The face was