stilted, empty-headed creatures who presumed to pay court to me. I clung to the virtues of noble birth, because I had imagined up to that time that illustrious families were superior to others in courage, merit, courtesy and liberality. I had not seen the nobility except in the portrait gallery of the Aldini Palace. There my ancestors appeared before me in all their glory, with all their great feats of arms or pious deeds recorded on oaken bas-reliefs. This one had ransomed three hundred slaves from barbarian pirates and bestowed true religion and freedom upon them; that one had sacrificed all his property in war for the salvation of his country; a third had shed all his blood for her on some glorious field. So that my admiration for them was justifiable, and I felt that the blood in my veins was no less warm and generous than theirs. But how shockingly the descendants of other patricians seemed to me to have degenerated! They retained none of the qualities of their race except insufferable incompetency and sickening presumption. I asked myself what had become of the nobility; I found it only on armorial bearings and on the doorways of palaces. I determined to become a nun, and I urged my mother so persistently to allow me to enter a convent, that she consented. She wept bitterly when she left me there. Prince Grimani approved of my whim; for since he had unearthed, in some corner of Lombardy, a sort of nephew who might become rich at my expense, and bear magnificently, thanks to my dowry, the imperishable name of Grimani, his only thought was to make me obedient to his wishes, and he flattered himself that religion would make my character more pliable. What fervent piety, what a thirst for martyrdom one must have in order to accept Hector! They took me away from the convent three months ago; the fact is that I was dying with ennui there, and the rigid discipline to which I had to submit was beyond my strength. And then I was so happy to return to my mother and she to have me with her! But six weeks of convent life had wrought a great change in my ideas. I had come to understand Jesus, to whom I had always prayed with my lips alone. In my hours of solitude, in church, in the earnest outpouring of my heart in prayer, I had learned that the son of Mary was the friend of the hard-working poor, and that he had justly scorned the grandeurs of this world. And how shall I tell you? at the same time that I opened my heart to new sympathies, the thing that in my childhood I used mentally to call my mother's shame presented itself to me under very different colors, and I thought of it only with deep emotion. What took place within me? I cannot say; but I said to myself: 'If I should do as mamma did, if I should fall in love with a man of a different station in life from my own, the whole world would throw stones at me, all except mamma.' She would take me in her arms, and hiding my blushes in her