She heaved a profound sigh, sadness itself, deep and beyond the power of words to describe. Minna thrilled to it. It told her what she knew well enough of these two, the unacknowledged father and daughter, that despite all that might happen, though Rome should be full of enemies for them, and the rest of the world swarming with friends; though utter poverty, and obscurity, and unspeakable hardships might be their lot there, and ease and distinction and consideration might await them elsewhere, yet their hearts were there, in their own city. They were genuine Romans. They tolerated other places and people, they resigned themselves to endure them as best they might; but the true, unmistakable Roman spirit was in them--the exclusiveness which cares not for the stranger, but only, as it were, endures him on sufferance; the want of longing for any other life than that which they could lead within the walls of Aurelian; the haughty, yet not ill-natured, superb contempt for other towns, countries and peoples, which is, as it were, the hall-mark of your true Roman. Minna knew it perfectly well, and resented it not in the least. She knew the fascination of the place, and had many a time said to herself: ‘If I were not an Englishwoman I would be a Roman; and if I were a Roman I should out-Roman all other Romans in my Romanness.’ So she knew perfectly well what Fulvia’s utterance of the word meant, and she sympathized with her to her heart’s core. ‘I suppose you have never had any communication with Rome since you left it?’ she asked seriously. Fulvia comprehended in the flash of an eye. ‘You mean, with my mother?’ she said, in a cool, hard voice. ‘Oh, certainly not. I never shall--never, under any circumstances. There is one fatal obstacle to it.’ ‘One more than others?’ ‘Yes. I have always cared for the truth, and spoken the truth. Graf T----, a friend of ours at Vienna, told me it was the only obstacle in the way of my becoming an accomplished stateswoman. It is a sort of disease with me, you know, and I quite see how very much it is against me in many ways. I can never feel the same to people who tell lies as to those who tell the truth. The reason why I can be so much with you and Beppo now is because you always told me the truth. She lied to me. She told me I was to be happy. She told me lies about herself, about her situation, about Beppo. If she had been openly brutal about my marriage, and had told me the naked truth all the time; that she meant to have money and freedom and ease, and was going to sell me to get them, and that she did not care for my happiness or her own salvation, so that she had them, I could have forgiven her in the end, as things have turned out. As it is, I shall never forgive her. I shall never be able to--because she lied to me, and persisted in it, and went on lying to the end. I can never forgive those lies.’ ‘No. But that would not deter you from going to Rome again?’