"But, oh dear! how stupid the world is! People thought because I
was selling what I didn't want I must be done. You would have
laughed to hear their commentaries. To tell you the truth, I was
so silly that I could have cried, but just at the moment when I
felt a wee bit badly, down came your telegram like an angel from
Heaven--and what do you think I did? The old Adam, or say the new
Eve, took possession of me, and the minute the people were gone I
hired a cab--a common garden cab, Roman variety, with a horse on
its last legs and a driver in ragged tweeds--and drove off to the
Pincio! I wanted to show those fine folk that I wasn't done, and
I did! They were all there, my dear friends and former
flatterers--every one of them who has haunted my house for years,
asking for this favour or that, and paying me in the coin of
sweetest smiles. It seemed as if fate had gathered them all
together for my personal inspection and wouldn't let a creature
escape.
"Did they see me? Not a soul of them! I drove through them and
between them, and they bowed across and before and behind me, and
I might have been as invisible as Asmodeus for all the
consciousness they betrayed of my presence. Was I humiliated?
Confused? Crushed? Oh, dear no! I was proud. I knew the day would
come, the day was near, when they must try to forget all this and
to persuade themselves it had never been, when for my own sake,
even mine, and for yours, most of all for yours, they would come
back humble, so humble and afraid.
"So I gave them every chance. I was bold and I did not spare them.
And when the sun began to sink behind St. Peter's and the band
stopped, and we turned to go, I know which of us went home happy
and unashamed. Oh, David Rossi! If you could have been there!
"I must write again on other matters. Meantime, one item of news.
Lawyer Napoleon, who continues to go to Regina C[oe]li to see the
bewildering Bruno, saw Charles Minghelli there in prison clothes!
If the God who settles the question of sex had only remembered to
make your wife the procurator-general, think how different the
history of the world would have been! The worst of it is he
mightn't have remembered to make you a woman; and in any case,
things being so nicely settled as they are, I don't think I want
to be a man. I waft a kiss to you on the wings of the wind. It's
ponente to-day, so it ought to be warm. "ROMA.