“No, Zia Clelia, you did not tell me. When will they return?” “Oh! in a short time. I expect them before night. It was such fine weather yesterday! They did not like to refuse to accompany the baroness, but it would not please them to lose two days of the Carnival, and the baroness wouldn’t, for anything in the world, miss her part at San Carlo. Teresina is to go there with her this evening.” The baroness in question was a friend of my aunt’s whom she particularly liked to boast of before me. If she was indebted to me for some of the acquaintances she was so proud of, she lost no opportunity of reminding me that for this one she was solely indebted to herself. “Ah! Ginevra mia!...” continued she, “you have a fine house, to be sure—I can certainly say nothing to the contrary; but if you could only see that of the baroness!... Such furniture! Such mirrors! Such gilding!... And then what a view!...” Here my aunt kissed the ends of her five fingers, and then opened her whole hand wide, expressing by this pantomime a degree of admiration for which words did not suffice.... “How?” said Stella with an air of surprise. “I thought her house was near here, and that there was no view at all. It seems to me she can see nothing from her windows.” “No view!” cried Donna Clelia. “No view from the baroness’ house!... See nothing from her windows!... What a strange mistake, Contessa Stella! You are in the greatest error. You can see everything from her windows—_everything_! Not a carriage, not a donkey, not a horse, not a man or woman on foot or horseback or in a carriage, can pass by without being seen; and as all the drawing‐rooms are _al primo piano_, you can see them as plainly as I see you, and distinguish the color of their cravats and the shape of the ladies’ cloaks.” “Ah! yes, yes, Zia Clelia, you are right. It is Stella who is wrong. The baroness has an admirable view, and quite suited to her tastes.” “And then,” continued Donna Clelia, waving her fan more deliberately to give greater emphasis to her words, “a situation unparalleled in the whole city of Naples!... A church on one side, and the new theatre on the other! And so near at the right and left that—imagine it!—there is a little gallery, which she has the key of, on one side, leading to the church; and on the other a passage, of which she also has the key, which leads straight to her box in the theatre! I ask if you can imagine anything more convenient?... But, apropos, Ginevra, have you seen Livia lately?” “Yes, I see her every week.” “Ah! _par exemple_,” said Donna Clelia, folding her hands, “there is a saint for you! But I have stopped going to see her since the Carnival began, because every time I go I feel I ought to become better, and the very next day off I go to confession.... It has precisely the same effect on the _ragazze_; so they have begged me not to take them to the convent again before Ash‐Wednesday.”