"Your father has charged me to look after you and to advise you." And to show me that she did not intend her office to be a sinecure she began at once to put me on my guard against the dangers Rome had for young men of my age, and exhorted me earnestly to avoid them. I must shun bad company, artists especially, and only associate with people that she chose for me. In fact, I received a lengthy sermon. I replied respectfully, and with conventional hypocrisy. "I regret that my son the Marquis should be away on our property at Romagna," she said, as I rose to go, "but I will introduce you to my second son, Don Ottavio, who will soon become a Monsignor. I hope you will like him, and that you will make friends with each other as you ought to...." She broke off precipitately-- "For you are nearly the same age, and he is a nice steady boy like yourself." She sent immediately for Don Ottavio, and I was presented to a tall, pale young man, whose downcast, melancholy eyes seemed already conscious of his hypocrisy. Without giving him time to speak, the Marquise offered me in his name the most ready services. He assented by bowing low at all his mother's suggestions, and it was arranged that he should take me to see the sights of the town on the following day and bring me back to dinner _en famille_ at the Aldobrandi palace. I had hardly gone twenty steps down the road when an imperious voice exclaimed behind me-- "Where are you going alone at this hour, Don Ottavio?" I turned round and saw a fat priest, who looked me up and down from head to foot with his eyes wide open. "I am not Don Ottavio," I said. The priest bowed down to the ground, profuse in apologies, and a moment after I saw him go into the Aldobrandi palace. I continued on my way, not much flattered at being taken for a budding Monsignor. In spite of the Marquise's warnings, perhaps even because of them, my next most pressing concern was to find out the lodging of a painter I knew, and I spent an hour with him at his studio talking over the legitimate or dubious ways of enjoying oneself that Rome could provide. I led him to the subject of the Aldobrandi. The Marquise, he said, after being excessively frivolous became highly devotional when she recognised that she was too old for further conquests. Her eldest son was a fool, who spent his time hunting and receiving the rents of the farms on his vast estates. They were going the right way to make an idiot of the second son, Don Ottavio; he was to be a cardinal some day. Until then he was given up to the Jesuits. He never went out alone; he was forbidden to look at a woman, or to take a single step without a priest at his heels, who had educated him for God's service, and who, after having been the Marquise's last _amico_, now ruled her house with almost despotic authority.