She was intelligent and sensitive, with a nature at once strong and romantic, and for such a girl no more delightful companion could be imagined than the elderly Italian gentleman, with his stores of learning and knowledge and research, and with also the background of his own life, chequered and varied, from his early boyhood on his father’s estate amongst the Sicilian hills; all the strange games he used to play, all the wild adventures he knew of, with brigands and robbers, with peasants and gentry--tales of savage vendetta or romantic love, of curious hereditary customs appertaining to his house and family. Then, later, when he was a youth, the burning sense of wrong before the Italian risings against the hated foreign rule, the yoke of the Bourbon--this sense of wrong which ate into his soul and into the souls of other generous, hot-blooded lads like him; the secret societies into which they banded themselves, their thrilling adventures and escapes--not always escapes, either; their seizure by the minions of the foreign Government: there was a story of one whole month in a veritable dungeon which absolutely enthralled Rhoda. Then the utter renunciation of his entire inheritance in order to serve _la patria_; his services first in the Garibaldian army; the battles, the sorties, the fighting in the red shirt, the wounds, the hardships, the privations; his enrolment amongst regular troops, the ultimate triumph, the march into Rome through the breach by Porta Pia, the hoisting of the tricolour on Castel Sant’ Angelo and the Quirinal. Different bits of this long story he would tell her at different times, and of how he had been so very poor ‘after the battle was over,’ how for a time he had gained his living by cutting cameos till he had found shelter as a clerk for the foreign correspondence of Gismondi and Nephew. Rhoda listened, spell-bound, watching with fearsome delight for what she called the ‘gory passages,’ when Signor Giuseppe’s head was uplifted and his nostrils dilated, and his dark eyes flashed fire from under his shaggy, still black eyebrows. ‘Oh, Aunt Minna, doesn’t he look terrible,’ she would whisper beneath her breath, with a delicious shudder, ‘when he tells of battles and wounds!’ Then Signor Oriole would laugh sarcastically, and say: ‘Ah, Rhoda, mia carina, you are like all the rest of your sex--so soft and gentle, and delighting so thoroughly in blood. I will wager that if the amphitheatre still existed, and the gladiators and the wild beasts were known to be particularly savage, you would flock there in crowds, even as in the days of Nero, and Caligula and Commodus. And some of the best seats would still be set apart for the Vestal Virgins, who in this case would be the daintiest and most high-born dames in society, and who would never fail to claim their privilege, any more than those pagan priestesses did--you are all alike, everyone exactly alike.’