Later in the evening she sat in the room she had made into a sitting-room talking to Hans Riemann, whom she had invited in to hang up some little pictures for her. ‘Hans,’ she asked suddenly, ‘what is Signor Giuseppe? Has he a business outside, or does he devote his whole time to the management of this extraordinary establishment?’ ‘Oh, he has a place in some lawyer’s office I believe--something very small! He gets about eighty pounds a year from it, all told, I fancy. The hours are not long, and that gives him leisure to boss this concern, do you see.’ ‘Oh ... well, it seems odd to me! I am sure he is not a stupid man----’ ‘Stupid? I should rather think not,’ cried Hans; ‘the very reverse. There’s hardly a thing you can mention that old Giuseppe can’t tell you something about: art, architecture, archæology, Church history, and other history. Politics, philosophy, religion--he has studied them all. Yes, he’s a first-rate all-round man is Giuseppe. If you ever want to know anything about the ruins, you know, or the excavations--anything about any of these old mosaics or wall-paintings, or about mythology, or about Roman history, from the time of Romulus and Remus, or whatever the creatures were, downwards, go to Signor Oriole and he’ll tell you. I once went with him, I and another fellow, to the Palatine Hill, and I can tell you I never heard anything so interesting in my life. He made it all live again, beginning with those old walls, don’t you know--those made of the big blocks of tufa when Rome was on the top of the Palatine and nowhere else, and he pointed to Villa Mills and shook his finger at it and said he had seen things beneath the convent which would have raised ghosts--awful ghosts--before the eyes of any but a set of cabbage-headed nuns: he swore he had seen the altar of the Pelasgic Roma Quadrata there. He took us round the whole thing--what one is allowed to see of it. It lasted for hours. We didn’t get back to lunch; we never missed it,’ said Hans in an almost awestruck tone, and, indeed, the fact was one worthy to be recorded in letters of gold. ‘All through those palaces he took us, and into Livia’s house and all the rest of it, and we followed him like lambs. I can tell you, if they had made our Roman history as interesting as that when we were at school I should have known more than I do now.’ ‘And do you think Signor Oriole’s history was made very interesting for him when he was at school?’ asked Minna with a touch of malice. ‘Now, Minna, that’s too bad of you! Am I not just trying to show that he’s a genius and not an ordinary man? I believe he knows just as much about it as any of these celebrated fellows, Lanciani or Roissieof, or any of them. He’s immensely learned,’ Hans went on with youthful enthusiasm. ‘He can always tell me everything I want to know.’ ‘An infallible gauge to the depths of his learning,’ murmured Minna to herself. Hans went on: