She went on to tell me some of her adventures. She had a keen sense of fun, and was evidently suffering for an outlet for it. She saw through the follies and pretences of people in a flash, but they were all such august and important people that, out of regard for her husband, she dared not let them suspect her clairvoyant power. She referred to her experiences abroad. She had not liked Europe--being quite frankly a provincial person. To Castleman County a foreigner was a strange, dark person who mixed up his consonants, and was under suspicion of being a fiddler or an opera-singer. The people she had met under her husband’s charge had been socially indubitable, but still, they were foreigners, and Sylvia could never really be sure what they meant. There was, for instance, the young son of a German steel-king, a person of amazing savoir faire, who had made bold to write books and exhibit pictures, and had travelled so widely that he had even heard of Castleman County. He had taken Sylvia to show her the sights of Berlin, and had rolled her down the “Sieges Allée,” making outrageous fun of his Kaiser’s taste in art, and coming at last to a great marble column, with a female figure representing Victory upon the top. “You will observe,” said the cultured young plutocrat, “that the Grecian lady stands a hundred meters in the air, and has no stairway. There is a popular saying about her which is delightful--that she is the only chaste woman in Berlin!” I had been through the culture-seeking stage, and knew my Henry James; so I could read between the lines of Sylvia’s experiences. I figured her as a person walking on volcanic ground, not knowing her peril, but vaguely disquieted by a smell of sulphur in the air. And once in a while a crack would open in the ground! There was the Duke of Something in Rome, for example, a melancholy young man, with whom she had coquetted, as she did, in her merry fashion, with every man she met. Being married, she had taken it for granted that she might be as winsome as she chose; but the young Italian had misunderstood the game, and had whispered words of serious import, which had so horrified Sylvia that she flew to her husband and told him the story--begging him incidentally not to horse-whip the fellow. In reply it had to be explained to her she had laid herself liable to the misadventure. The ladies of the Italian aristocracy were severe and formal, and Sylvia had no right to expect an ardent young duke to understand her native wildness.