Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/44

Rh Her Monsignore went home to luncheon with her, and made himself as agreeable as a courtly churchman always is to every one; and afterwards she studied the Penal Settlement more closely by calling on those leaders of it whose cards lay in a heap in her anteroom, and amused herself with its mind and manners, its attributes and antecedents.

"After all, the only people in any country that one can trust oneself to know are the natives of it," she said to herself, as she went to the weekly "day" of the infinitely charming Marchesa del Trasimene, nata Da Bolsena, where she met Della Rocca and M. de St. Louis, as everybody meets everybody else, morning, afternoon, and evening, fifty times in the twenty-four hours in Floralia, the results being antipathy or sympathy in a fatal degree.

In her girations she herself excited extreme attention and endless envy, especially in the breasts of those unhappy outsiders whom she termed the Penal Settlement.

There was something about her!—Worth Pingât and La Ferrière dressed the Penal