Minna was not particularly hungry. She leaned back in her chair and looked at the company, and held a little conversation with the German lady and a little with Hans, and in the intervals watched her opposite neighbour with a kind of fascination which annoyed herself--she did not know why. He did not address her again. His looks wandered, or, rather, darted, sharply in every direction. The plaintive Ettore came to him repeatedly, apparently for directions, which were given to him in a low tone but with considerable agitation of manner; his eyes flashed, his hands worked, his patience was evidently not of the most elastic kind. Minna remembered what Hans had said, laughing, about Signor Giuseppe--that he supposed he was the manager. Apparently his surmise was right enough. His thoughts were evidently very much engrossed with the serving of the repast, which was very Italian in character and very slow in process. There was something incongruous and absurd in the contrast between his appearance and his pursuit. She felt inclined to laugh. Then, all at once, his sharp ear caught the import of a discussion at some little distance from him, which was going on between an English girl and her Italian neighbour, about the enormities committed by Nero, and the burning of Rome in his reign. The English young lady, whose entire views on the subject were evidently derived from Baedeker and some extremely elementary guide to Roman history, was duly shocked at the monster’s wickedness. Her neighbour, a young Italian in training for an _avvocate_, or lawyer, was vague to the last degree on the subject. Had the Emperor Nero, then, committed so many atrocities? He did not know. He had seen Rossi act the part in a play--oh, a long, very long play of five acts, most tedious! Rossi was too old, too fat; he puffed, he grunted; impossible that any illusion could exist with such a figure acting the principal part. In this long dry play it seemed to him that Nero was a born coward, and there had also been in it a woman, a most wearisome woman, who shouted and scolded and threatened, and was hideously ugly to boot. ‘But that was a play; this is history,’ said the young lady. ‘Really! well, I do not know much history, sa!’ said the young man, who then owned that for his part he had never been inside the Colosseum, nor to the Palatine Hill, nor any of those tumble-down places. He preferred Ronzi and Singers’ restaurant, or that of the Milano in Monte Citorio. ‘Oh, signore!’ cried the young lady. ‘But you must have learnt at school how wicked Nero was--the Christians--why, he----’