Mrs. Pinsent looked thoughtful; she didn’t want to think that Mr. Pinsent was the wrong kind of man, it would have been dreadful after being married to him for thirty years. Still, she couldn’t honestly have said that she hadn’t had any bother with him. Probably Mr. Pinsent had forgotten it; men do not remember that kind of thing in the same way. They chose a French hotel in Rome because they thought it would be more Italian, and when they arrived there everything was just as foreign as possible, which was what the Pinsents wanted--provided that they could get enough hot water. The Hotel le Roy was even for Rome extraordinarily “black.” Its _clientèle_ was composed of French priests, their sisters, ladies of pronounced age and severity, one or two French families of prehistoric claims, small means and a son at a seminary, and a few Dutch Catholics who were, if anything, blacker than the French, but distinctly pleasanter to the English. Black French Catholics do not like English Protestants. The war may have softened this feeling, but this episode took place a year before the war, when the _Entente Cordiale_ was looked upon as a Socialist blunder to be sharply counteracted in private by a studied coldness of manner. Mrs. Pinsent, whose French the whole family relied upon, did nothing to improve the situation. She said to Madame la Comtesse de Brenteuil, who couldn’t very well help going up in the lift with her, “Isn’t it a pity the Vatican shuts so often for church things? They say we sha’n’t be able to get into the Sistine chapel in Holy Week, and one of my daughters is writing an article on the Sibyls--it’s really most annoying!” Madame de Brenteuil looked at Mrs. Pinsent as if she were a smut that had fallen on her sleeve; then, with a weary irony, she observed, “Perhaps, Madame, the English do not realize that the Holy Father is a Catholic?” Mrs. Pinsent was eager to reassure her as to Anglo-Saxon intuitions. She said, “Oh, yes--we quite understand his own personal views--but it isn’t as if Rome really belonged to him, is it?” Fortunately the lift stopped. It was not Madame de Brenteuil’s _étage_, but she got out. After this incident no French person in the Le Roy spoke to Mrs. Pinsent or her daughters, so that it was rather difficult for Léon Legier to begin--especially as he was a third cousin to the Comtesse, and _lié_ to almost everybody there. He had made up his mind to begin from the moment that Rose Pinsent dropped a breakfast roll and blushed as she stooped to pick it up. He had never seen such a blush before on any woman’s face, and any color he had failed to surprise upon a woman’s face he had naturally supposed could not exist. Apparently it did, for Rose had it. Her blush was as fine in hue as that of a pink tulip and as delicate as a winter cloud at dawn.