I believe I was a little jealous, even then, of the kind of official ownership which the Ambassador and his family seemed to claim in the man who, though neither of us dreamed it yet, was very soon to be my husband. Anyway, I permitted myself an occasional mood of pleasant melancholy towards evening when my own dear people, like all the others who had any deference at all for public opinion, were driving round and round the public gardens, listening to the band. Two of our party had agreed to slap public opinion quite brutally in the face; these were my erratic sister and her equally erratic fiancé. They hired a little sailing boat, and day after day, towards 4 o’clock, went off by themselves, unchaperoned save by the boatman, for long expeditions, whence they returned, gloriously happy and hungry, just in time for a very late dinner. Once and once only they lured me out, why, I could not imagine at the moment, as I was a bad sailor in those days and did not in the least want to go. But I soon found out their wicked motive. I had taken it upon myself to order the meals while we were at Leghorn, as my mother thought it would be good practice for me. Now there was one dish which we all, except Annie and Erich, particularly disliked, a fry of very bony, very rank-smelling crayfish, called _spannocchi_. After one trial I had steadily refused to have it brought to the table. But those two young monsters liked _spannocchi_, and they laid their plot quite cleverly, and everything turned out just as they intended. We beat out to sea, the weather was squally, and in a short time I was lying, a sea-sick heap, in the bottom of the boat, begging with tears to be taken home. This was what they had been waiting for. “Not unless you promise us _spannocchi_ for dinner to-morrow!” they exclaimed in a breath, grinning down at me in my misery. They looked as big and wicked as the pictures of the demon lover in our old ballad book, when he is sailing the faithless wife to hell! Of course I promised—and was a most unpopular person with the rest of the family at dinner time the next night. But their boatman avenged me in the end. The day before we returned to Rome they took leave of him with a little present, and he, who had all along imagined them to be a young married couple, because they came unaccompanied, testified his gratitude and goodwill in true Italian fashion, by crying enthusiastically, “Heaven bless you, my good Signori, and may it be _a fine boy_!” Annie put her head down and ran for home, and Erich was not allowed to come to dinner that night.