It was a strange, gaunt wilderness of stone, this old villa of the Marchioni. It would have held hundreds of serving-men--it had as many chambers as one of the palaces down in Rome--but this old woman was all the servitor it had, and in the grand old hall, with sculptured shields upon the columns of it and Umbrian frescoes in the roof, she spread their board and brought them their onion-soup and their dish of _pasta_, and while they ate it looked on and muttered her talk and twirled her distaff, day after day, year after year, the same. Life is homely and frugal here, and has few graces. The ways of life in these grand old places are like nettles and thistles set in an old majolica vase that has had knights and angels painted on it. You know what I mean, you who know Italy. Do you remember those pictures of Vittorio Carpaccio and of Gentileo? They say that this is the life our Italy saw once in her cities and her villas: that is the life she wants. Sometimes, when you are all alone in these vast deserted places, the ghosts of all that pageantry pass by you, and they seem fitter than the living people for these courts and halls. "Madama Flavia will see the fish," said the old crone, and hobbled away. Madama Flavia! How many times has Tiber heard such a name as that breathed on a lover's mouth to the sigh of the mandoline, uttered in revel or in combat, or as a poisoner whispered it stealing to mix the drug with the wine in the goblet. Madama Flavia! All Italy seemed in it--all love, all woe! There is a magic in some names. Madama Flavia! Just such a woman as this it needs would be to fitly wear such a name--a woman with low brows and eyes that burn, and a mouth like the folded leaves that lie in the heart of a rose--a woman to kneel at morn in the black shadows of the confessional, and to go down into the crowd of masks at night and make men drunk with love. "Madama Flavia!" The name (so much it said to me) halted stupidly on my lips: I stood in her presence like a foolish creature. I never before had lacked either courage or audacity: I trembled now. I had been awake all the night, gazing at the dim, dusky pile of her roof as it rose out from the olives black against the stars; and she knew it--she knew it very well. That I saw in her face. And she was Madama Flavia, and I was Pipistrello the juggler. What could I say to her? I could have fallen at her feet and kissed her or killed her, but I could not speak. No doubt I looked but a poor boor to her--a giant and a dolt. She was leaning against a great old marble vase--leaning her hands on it, and her chin on her hands. She had some red carnations in her breast: their perfume came to me. She was surrounded by decay, dusty desolation, the barrenness of a poverty that is drearier than any of the poverty of the poor; but so might have looked Madama Lucrezia in those old days when the Borgia was God's vicegerent.