That there would be a very select company we had been told; but we did not expect to see King Victor Emanuel, Prince Umberto, and Princess Margherita, who, with their numerous suites and many invited guests, quite filled the small rooms of the Villino. I was presented to them all. I found the Princess perfectly bewitching and charming beyond words; the Prince was very amiable, and the King royally indifferent and visibly bored. That sums up my impressions. At the risk of committing _lèse majesté_, I must say that the King is more than plain. He has the most enormous mustaches, wide-open eyes, and a very gruff, military voice, speaking little, but staring much. The Prince, whom I had seen in Paris during the Exposition, talked mostly about Paris and of his admiration of the Emperor and Empress. The Princess was fascinating, and captivated me on the spot by her affability and her natural and sweet manner. The Colosseum looked rather theatrical in the glare of the red and green Bengal lights, and I think it lost a great deal of its dignity and grandeur by this cheap method of illumination. I met there a Spanish gentleman whom I used to know in Paris years ago. He was at that time the Marquis de Lema, a middle-aged beau, who was always ready to fill any gap in society where a noble marquis was needed. He began life, strange to say, as a journalist, and as such made himself so useful to the ex-King of Naples that the King, to reward him, hired the famous Farnesina Palace for ninety-nine years. Here the former Marquis, who is now Duke di Ripalda, lives very much aggrandized as a descendant of the Cid, glorying in his ancestorship. He was very glad to see me again, he said, and to prove it came often to dine with us. One day he asked Mrs. Lawrence, Miss Chapman, and myself to take tea with him in the romantic garden of the Farnesina. Mrs. Lawrence said it was like a dream, walking under the orange-trees and looking down on the old Tiber, which makes a sudden turn at the bottom of the broad terrace. Her dream came suddenly to an end when she saw the stale cakes and the weak and watery tea and oily chocolate which, out of politeness, we felt obliged to swallow; and the nightmare set in when she saw his apartment on the first floor, furnished by himself with his own individual taste, which was simply awful. But who cares for the mother-of-pearl inlaid furniture covered with hideous modern blue brocade and the multicolored carpets in which his coat of arms were woven, when one can look at his Sodomas and Correggios and Raphaels? His coat of arms, which is a sword with "Si, si, no, no," is displayed everywhere throughout the palace.