to be wooed by this diplomatist, with his ribbons and stars, by this smiling, courtly man of sixty, who did not look a day more than fifty. And, when he asked Papa for her hand, she accepted him, very glad and happy, a little flushed and triumphant, rather inclined to preen herself in the delectable atmosphere of congratulation; she was now, thanks to De Staffelaer, decidedly a member of “the set” and, at the same time, did not need “the set” so very much, now that she was going to Rome, to spend her life in circles such as that of the Quirinal and the “white” Roman world. . . . She had attained her aim. She had a charming husband, not young, but none the less passionately in love with her and vain, in his turn, of his young and pretty wife. She had a title. She had money enough, even though De Staffelaer’s affairs were somewhat involved. She found the Court balls at Rome more splendid than the routs at the Hague; she was introduced to all sorts of great names. The Italian aristocracy, it is true, was even more exclusive than that of the Hague; but she moved in a brilliant circle of diplomatists and foreigners. Only, she was struck by the fact that, abroad, the members of the corps diplomatique were not stared at so much as in the opera at the Hague or on the terrace at Scheveningen. It almost annoyed her: she would have liked to be stared at in her turn. But, in the society of a big capital like Rome, the wife of the Netherlands minister, even though she was young and pretty and well-dressed, was not so important a person as the Mar-
