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Rh was perfect in all points save the lady's somewhat indiscriminate predilection for assemblies and receptions. She had a thousand letters of introduction to deliver, and they entailed a vast deal of social exertion. Often, on balmy nights when he would have preferred to meditate among the ruins of the Forum, or to listen to the moonlit ripple of the Adriatic, Benvolio found himself dragged away to kiss the hand of a decayed princess, or to take a pinch from the snuff-box of an epicurean cardinal. But the cardinals, the princesses, the ruins, the warm southern tides which seemed the voice of history itself—these and a thousand other things resolved themselves into a vast pictorial spectacle—the very stuff that inspiration is made of. Everything he had written before coming to Italy now appeared to him worthless; this was the needful stamp, the consecration of talent. One day, however, this pure felicity was clouded; by a trifle you will say, possibly, but you must remember that in men of Benvolio's disposition primary impulses are almost always produced by trifles light as air. The Countess, speaking of the tone of voice of some one they had met, happened to say that it reminded her of the voice of that queer little woman at home—the daughter of the blind professor. Was this pure inadvertence, or was it malicious design? Benvolio never knew, though he immediately demanded of her, in