Page:Her Roman Lover (Frothingham, 1911).djvu/62



O Anne the first few weeks of this Roman winter moved almost breathlessly. She was entering a social world more full of color and event than any she had ever known, and for the moment it absorbed her attention more than the city itself. It was also a world which she was conscious of charming easily; and whether in the salons of the Whites, where she met a liberal, spirited, and intelligent company, the men and women who are forming the national life of modern Italy, or in the ancient and more sombre palaces of the Blacks, where scholarly and subtle prelates showed her their ability to pay charming compliments, and gentle mannered, high-bred women of the old régime received her with delicate reserve, the girl felt herself happily, easily at home. She met a great number of ideas, and an equal eagerness to impart them. Conversational ardor was something for which social life in her own country had not prepared her, but among the Latins and most of those people who for reasons temperamental or otherwise have elected to live