been simply ridiculous. A coronet, however, was a pretty ornament,
and if it could solace a poor cripple to have such on her card, who
would begrudge it to her?

Of her husband, or of his individual family, she never spoke, but
with her admirers she would often allude in a mysterious way to her
married life and isolated state, and, pointing to her daughter,
would call her the last of the blood of the emperors, thus referring
Neroni's extraction to the old Roman family from which the worst of
the Caesars sprang.

The "signora" was not without talent and not without a certain sort
of industry; she was an indomitable letter-writer, and her letters
were worth the postage: they were full of wit, mischief, satire,
love, latitudinarian philosophy, free religion, and, sometimes,
alas, loose ribaldry. The subject, however, depended entirely on the
recipient, and she was prepared to correspond with anyone but moral
young ladies or stiff old women. She wrote also a kind of poetry,
generally in Italian, and short romances, generally in French. She
read much of a desultory sort of literature, and as a modern linguist
had really made great proficiency. Such was the lady who had now
come to wound the hearts of the men of Barchester.

Ethelbert Stanhope was in some respects like his younger sister,
but he was less inestimable as a man than she as a woman. His great
fault was an entire absence of that principle which should have
induced him, as the son of a man without fortune, to earn his own
bread. Many attempts had been made to get him to do so, but these
had all been frustrated, not so much by idleness on his part as by a
disinclination to exert himself in any way not to his taste. He had