She had a hoarse little laugh which was nevertheless agreeable. I felt the impact of a strong, vital temperament, self-willed, self-controlled, intensely eager and ambitious. I soon discovered she was genuinely interested in history, which is one of my great failings and delights. She liked vital, unillusioned biography such as that of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions, Cellini’s Diary, and the personal reminiscences of various court favorites in different lands. She was interested in some plays, but cared little for fiction, which I take to be commendable. Her great passion at the moment, she told me, was the tracing out in all its ramifications of the history and mental attitude of the Borgia family especially Cæsar and Lucrezia--which I look upon as a remarkable passion for a woman. It takes a strong, healthy, clear-thinking temperament to enjoy the mental vagaries of the Borgias--father, son and daughter. She had conceived a sincere admiration for the courage, audacity, passion and directness of action of Cæsar, to say nothing of the lymphatic pliability and lure of Lucrezia, and the strange philosophic anarchism and despotic individualism of their father, Alexander VI. I wonder how much the average reader knows of the secret history of the Borgias. It is as modern as desire, as strange as the strangest vagaries of which the mind is capable. I am going to give here the outline of the Borgia family history as Mrs. Q. crisply related it to me, on almost the first evening we met, for I, like so many Americans, while knowing something of these curious details in times past had but the haziest recollection then. To be told it in Rome itself by a breezy American who used the vernacular and who simply could not suppress her Yankee sense of humor, was as refreshing an experience as occurred in my whole trip. Let me say first that Mrs. Q. admired beyond words the Italian subtlety, craft, artistic insight, political and social wisdom, governing ability, and as much as anything their money-getting and money-keeping capacities. The raw practicality of this Italian family thrilled her.