degree, it had been forced upon his perception, that he had been
making an ass of himself; and the appreciation of that fact by the
other young men among whom he lived had been indicated with that
coarse brutality, as the poet said to himself, which was the outcome
of minds not "softened by the study of the ingenuous arts," as his
own was. He had been consistently snubbed and flouted, he and his
poetry, and his love-making, and his carefully prepared Carnival
costumes.

The result was, that at the ball on that last night of the Carnival,
the Conte Leandro was not in charity with all men, and, indeed,
hardly with any man. He was feeling very sore, and would fain have
avenged his pain by making any one else feel equally sore, if he had
it in his power to do so.

He was especially angry with Ludovico di Castelmare. Had he not
chaffed him unmercifully about the verses he had sent to La Bianca?
Was it not, to all appearance, due to him that the Diva had never
condescended to cast a glance on either him or his poetry? Had he
not called him Aesop, when it was plain to all the world that he
represented Apollo? And now this night, again, he had taken the
opportunity of turning him into ridicule in the presence of La
Bianca; and he and she had spoken of the possibility of their being
troubled with his company as of a nightmare. For the painful fact
was that their uncomplimentary expressions had been heard by the
poet; who, when he had left Ludovico and Bianca in the little
supper-room together, had retreated no further than just to the
other side of a curtain, which hung, Italian fashion, by the side of
the open door. Finding that there was nobody there--for the little
buffet was at the end of the entire suite of rooms, and all those