‘Belongs to one of the oldest and noblest Florentine families,’ said Hans in an explanatory manner to Minna, in English. ‘Like all the rest of them, you know--_decaduto_. Italians and Irishmen are always descended from princes, and the lower their station the greater were the princes--in the days that are no more. It’s awfully sad! This way, Minna, please. I should deceive you if I led you to expect much in the way of punctuality here. I hope you are not famished.’ ‘No,’ said Minna indifferently, as she followed him into the _salon_--a fine, large, admirably proportioned room, with a slightly vaulted ceiling and three windows. It was not at all surprising in Rome that a palace, or rather part of one, should now be a boarding-house; there was a fitness in the order of things which brought a nobly descended Florentine into its halls as a waiter. But there was something pathetic or exasperating--according to the temper of the observers--in the contrast between the just proportions and pleasing form of the room itself, which was so well designed to be furnished with stately richness and splendour, and the order of things actually prevailing. There was a piano, of course. There was a round table in the middle of the room, with a heavy, hideous plush cover; the said table was covered with trash of the meanest description--odd volumes of Tauchnitz novels with torn backs; a ragged archaic Baedeker’s ‘Central Italy and Rome’--for there are travellers who will take all the trouble necessary to get to a new country, and will then be too mean and too ignorant to buy themselves a new guide-book; a frightful blue-glass vase, filled with artificial flowers; a monstrosity in the shape of an inkstand (‘Does anyone ever write letters here?’ Minna wondered); and other decorative trifles of a like nature. The walls were hung with a series of the crudest chromo-lithographs of sentimental pictures--a simpering young lady in a crinoline and chignon lifting a bright green-upper skirt to show a dazzling white under one and ugly little black boots with elastic sides is being handed by an equally simpering young gentleman towards a close carriage, which looks much too small to contain her crinoline alone, not to speak of her own person and remaining garments, and those of the young gentleman. This fascinating work of art is labelled ‘I nuovi sposi.’ On the other side of a tarnished, distorting glass, which had once been a mirror, hung as a companion picture, and an encouragement to matrimony, the representation of a lovely being with an abnormally swan-like throat, and flowing robes and veil of black crape, pouring copious tears upon a little gravestone, with the perspective of which something had gone hopelessly wrong; she is surrounded by crosses, cypresses, and other accompaniments of a graveyard scene, and the exhilarating inscription of this work of art is ‘La Madre desolata.’