‘I don’t mind telling you about it,’ Fulvia went on. ‘You were so kind to me when I was such a silly, miserable girl. I don’t forget old kindnesses, and I should like you to know me as I am--no better and no worse. I was miserable for ever so long--worse than miserable, dark, wretched, despairing. Oh, it was awful, that hard, dry wretchedness that eats into your soul like some hideous corroding disease! I made up my mind at once to cut myself adrift from my old life, absolutely and entirely. I did not even write to Beppo, as you know. I had been made to do what I didn’t want to do. We all hate that--naturally. I was vexed, cross, and even furiously angry. But I got over it. I found it was worth while to get over it, and that, on the other hand, to sulk and pout, and cry till my eyes were scarlet all round, and my nose like a beetroot, was not worth while. Do you know when I first felt that--that it was worth while to get over it?’ ‘How can I know?’ ‘It was at a great ball in London, at a very grand house to which we had been invited through an Australian Minister then staying in London, who could not afford to risk my husband’s displeasure. There was money in the question, of course; there always is,’ said Fulvia, smiling again. ‘We went to this ball. I was in a very bad humour. I had all sorts of silly, sentimental scruples about putting on my white satin and diamonds and pearls--a lamb dressed out for the sacrifice, a kind of Iphigenia, you know, and all the rest of it. Dio mio! what nonsense! What a self-important, self-conscious _bambina_, I was! I had to go, whether I liked it or not. I had been crying in the morning, and my husband was very angry with me. He had threatened me with all sorts of vague but terrible punishments if I did not, as he called it, rise to the occasion and pull myself together a bit. And I will tell you something else--a most ridiculous thing. I had just passed my seventeenth birthday; the fearful and wonderful hours at which the entertainments began, to which we went, were a physical trial to me. Things are late in Rome too, of course, but, then, I hadn’t been to any things, except occasionally. I was a mere child. I craved my sleep, my beautiful long, unbroken sleep that I had always enjoyed till then. Sometimes I used to fall asleep while my maid was dressing me for one of those functions, and had hard work not to do so when I got to them--not to yawn in the face of my partner at dinner or in a dance. This time, however, I was excited even before we arrived at ---- House. It was all very new to me. I had never been at anything like that before. I was at first so shy and sad that I kept very quiet, and was thus saved from committing some solecism or making a fool of myself somehow. As the evening went on, I found that people were looking at me. I found that men were asking to be introduced to me. They were such wonderful men, it then seemed to me--so utterly different from any men I had ever seen before.