never to go on again, as if she had stuck fast like a fly in a drop of
amber, as if nothing of interest could ever happen to her though she
might live a hundred years.

She could hardly remember anything which had given her great pleasure.
She did not remember to have been ever radiantly happy, though she
could not recall much unhappiness since she had left the convent
school. The last thing that had really hurt her had been the death of
her pet canary, and she had kept her feelings to herself as well as
she could, with the old aristocratic instinct of hiding pain.

It was all idle and strangely empty, and yet hard to understand. She
would have been much surprised if she could have guessed how much its
emptiness interested other people in Rome; how the dowagers chattered
about her over their tea, abusing her mother and all her relations for
abandoning her like a waif; how the men reasoned about Baron
Volterra's deep-laid schemes, trying to make out that his semi-
adoption of Sabina, as they called it, must certainly bode ruin to
some one, since he had never in his life done anything without a
financial object; how the young girls unanimously declared that the
Baroness wanted Sabina for one of her sons, because she was such a
dreadful snob; how Cardinal Della Crusca shook his wise old head
knowingly, as he, who knew so much, always did on the rare occasions
when he knew nothing about the matter in hand; how a romantic young
English secretary of Embassy christened her the Princess in the Tower;
and how old Pompeo Sassi went up to his vineyard on Monte Mario every
Sunday and Thursday and sat almost all the afternoon under the
chestnut-tree thinking about her and making unpractical plans of his
own.