'By the by--the Ferentino announces another charity bazaar for Epiphany,' said the Baroness d'Isola. 'Does anybody know anything about it yet?'
'I am one of the patronesses,' said Elena Muti.
'And you are a most valuable patroness,' broke in Don Filippo del Monte, a man of about forty, almost bald, a keen sharpener of epigrams, whose face seemed a sort of Socratic mask; the right eye was forever on the move, and flashed with a thousand changing expressions, while the left remained stationary and glazed behind the single eye-glass, as if he used the one for expressing himself and the other for seeing. 'At the May bazaar, you brought in a perfect shower of gold.'
'Oh, the May bazaar--what a mad affair that was!' exclaimed the Marchesa.
While the servants were filling the glasses with iced champagne, she added, 'Do you remember, Elena, our stalls were close together?'
'Five louis d'or a drink--five louis d'or a bite!' Don Filippo called, in the voice of a street-hawker. Elena and the Marchesa burst out laughing.
'Why yes, of course, Filippo, you cried the wares,' said Donna Francesca. 'Now what a pity you were not there, _cugino mio_! For five louis you might have eaten fruit out of which I had had the first bite, and have drunk champagne out of the hollow of Elena's hands for five more.'
'How scandalous!' broke in the Baroness d'Isola, with a horrified grimace.
'Ah, Mary, I like that! And did you not sell cigarettes that you lighted up first yourself for a louis?' cried Francesca through her laughter. Then she became suddenly grave. 'Every deed, with a charitable object in view, is sacred,' she observed sententiously. 'By merely biting into fruit, I collected at least two hundred louis.'
'And you?' Andrea Sperelli turned to Elena with as constrained smile--'With your human drinking-cup--how much did you get?'
Everybody was full of fun and laughter, excepting the Marchese d'Ateleta, who was old, and afflicted with incurable deafness; was padded and painted--in a word, artificial from head to foot. He was very like one of the figures one sees at a wax work show. From time to time--usually the wrong one--he would give vent to a little dry cackling laugh, like the rattle of some rusty mechanism inside him.