majority--well, the majority bolt. And I am sure I should if I were one of them. I do not think you could complain if your beautiful Romeo did. I can see you so exactly, with your pretty, little, grave face, and your eyes that have such a fatal aptitude for tears, and your solemn little views about matrimony and its responsibilities, making yourself quite odious to this mirthful Apollo of yours, and innocently believing all the while that you are pleasing Heaven and saving your own dignity by being so remarkably unpleasant! Are you _very_ angry with me? I am afraid so. Myself, I would much sooner have an unfaithful man than a dull one; the one may be bored _by_ you, but the other bores _you_, which is immeasurably worse.' _From the Principessa di San Zenone, Coombe Bysset, to the Lady Gwendolen Chichester, S. Petersburg._ "DEAR GWEN,--How can you _possibly_ tell what Mamma did when she was young? I daresay she fretted dreadfully. Now, of course, she has got used to it--like all other miserable women. If people marry only to long to be with other people, what is the use of being married at all? I said so to Piero, and he answered, very insolently, "_Il n'y a point! Si on le savait!_" He sent for some more dreadful French books, Gyp's and Richepin's and Gui de Maupassant's, and he lies about reading them all day long when he isn't asleep. He is very often asleep in the daytime. He apologises when he is found out, but he yawns as he does so. You say I should amuse him, but I _can't_ amuse him. He doesn't care for any English news, and he is beginning to get irritable because I cannot talk to him in Italian, and he declares my French detestable, and there is always something dreadful happening. There has been such a terrible scene in the village. Four of the Coombe Bysset men, two blacksmiths, a carpenter, and a labourer, have ducked Toniello in the village pond on account of his attention to their womenkind; and Toniello, when he staggered out of the weeds and the slime, drew his knife on them and stabbed two very badly. Of course, he has been taken up by the constables, and the men he hurt moved to the county hospital. The magistrates are furious and scandalised; and Piero!--Piero has nobody to play billiards with him. When the magistrates interrogated him about Toniello, as, of course, they were obliged to do, he got into a dreadful passion because one of them said that it was just like a cowardly Italian to carry a knife and make use of it. Piero absolutely _hissed_ at the solemn old gentleman who mumbled this. "And your people," he cried, "are they so very courageous? Is it better to beat a man into a jelly, or kick a woman with nailed boots, as your English mob does? Where is there anything cowardly? He was one against four. In my country there is not a night that goes by without a _rissa_ of that sort, but nobody takes any notice. The jealous persons are left to fight it out as best they may; after all, it is the women's fault."