Count Pasolini's father was also one of Pio Nono's Liberal Ministers, and the family, at the time, at any rate, of which I am speaking, combined Liberalism and sympathies for England with an enlightened and ardent Catholicism. I first made friends with Contessa Maria when we found her, on a cold February day, receiving in an apartment in the Piazza dei Santi Apostoli--rather gloomy rooms, to which her dark head and eyes, her extraordinary expressiveness and grace, and the vivacity of her talk, seemed to lend a positive brilliance and charm. In her I first came to know, with some intimacy, a cultivated Italian woman, and to realize what a strong kindred exists between the English and the Italian educated mind. Especially, I think, in the case of the educated _women_ of both nations. I have often felt, in talking to an Italian woman friend, a similarity of standards, of traditions and instincts, which would take some explaining, if one came to think it out. Especially on the practical side of life, the side of what one may call the minor morals and judgments, which are often more important to friendship and understanding than the greater matters of the law. How an Italian lady manages her servants and brings up her children; her general attitude toward marriage, politics, books, social or economic questions--in all these fields she is, in some mysterious way, much nearer to the Englishwoman than the Frenchwoman is. Of course, these remarks do not apply to the small circle of "black" families in Italy, particularly in Rome, who still hold aloof from the Italian kingdom and its institutions. But the Liberal Catholic, man or woman, who is both patriotically Italian and sincerely religious, will discuss anything or anybody in heaven or earth, and just as tolerantly as would Lord Acton himself. They are cosmopolitans, and yet deep rooted in the Italian soil. Contessa Maria, for instance, was in 1889 still near the beginnings of what was to prove for twenty-five years the most interesting _salon_ in Rome. Everybody met there. Grandees of all nations, ambassadors, ecclesiastics, men of literature, science, archeology, art, politicians, and diplomats--Contessa Pasolini was equal to them all, and her talk, rapid, fearless, picturesque, full of knowledge, yet without a hint of pedantry, gave a note of unity to a scene that could hardly have been more varied or, in less skilful hands, more full of jarring possibilities. But later on, when I knew her better, I saw her also with peasant folk, with the country people of the Campagna and the Alban hills. And here one realized the same ease, the same sympathy, the same instinctive and unerring _success_, as one might watch with delight on one of her "evenings" in the Palazzo Sciarra. When she was talking to a peasant woman on the Alban ridge, something broad and big and primitive seemed to come out in her, something of the _Magna parens_, the Saturnian land; but something, too, that our Englishwomen,