upon your time, embark you in tragedies, and when you say 'No' to them-
then they squarely accuse you of selfishness and of treason! It is my
fault, too. Why did I listen to his confidences? Have I not known for
years that a man who relates his love-affairs on so short an acquaintance
as ours is a scoundrel and a fool? And with such people there can be no
possible connection. He amused me at the beginning, when he told me his
sly intrigue, without naming the person, as they all do at first. He
amused me still more by the way he managed to name her without violating
that which people in society call honor. And to think that the women
believe in that honor and that discretion! And yet it was the surest
means of entering Steno's, and approaching Alba.... I believe I am about
to pay for my Roman flirtation. If Gorka is a Pole, I am from Lorraine,
and the heir of the Castellans will only make me do what I agree to,
nothing more."

In such an ill-humor and with such a resolution, Julien reached the door
of his house. If that dwelling was not the palace alluded to by
Signorina Sabatina, it was neither the usually common house as common
today in new Rome as in contemporary Paris, modern Berlin, and in certain
streets of London opened of late in the neighborhood of Hyde Park. It
was an old building on the Place de la Trinite-des-Monts, at an angle of
the two streets Sistina and Gregoriana. Although reduced to the state of
a simple pension, more or less bourgeoise, that house had its name marked
in certain guide-books, and like all the corners of ancient Rome it
preserved the traces of a glorious, artistic history. The small columns
of the porch gave it the name of the tempietto, or little temple, while
several personages dear to litterateurs had lived there, from the
landscape painter Claude Lorrain to the poet Francois Coppee. A few
paces distant, almost opposite, lived Poussin, and one of the greatest
among modern English poets, Keats, died quite near by, the John Keats