because a serious flirtation, a passion, formed part of the game, as it were. And then, in very elegant language, she had complained to Van der Welcke of the void in her life and said all sorts of fine things about soul-hunger and life-weariness, without knowing anything about soul-hunger or life-weariness and remembering that she had to go to her dressmaker, that afternoon, and to two receptions and that she had her own reception in the evening. Then she parroted bits out of a French novel, acted a scene or two after the same model, thinking it time to bring a little literature into her life. He, a good-looking fellow—short and well-knit, sturdy without being clumsy, with a pair of boyish blue eyes, a shapely, round head with lightly-curling, short, brown hair, like a head of Hermes, and still exceedingly young—thought that it would look well for him to make a little love to his chief’s wife, without going any farther, of course. . . . But it was impossible for them to play with fire unscathed, in an atmosphere like that of Rome. They saw so many French novels acted around them that, quite involuntarily, they began to feel not only like a modern hero and heroine of fiction or a pair of fashionable actors, but what they were: a young man and a young woman; she the wife of a man old enough to be her father. What had started with a compliment and a laugh—because of what her friends had told her—led to a warmer pressure of the hand, not once but many times, the abandonment of a waltz, a kiss and the rest. . . . They both glided towards sin
