It was a small party, and every one felt the absence of that preliminary chill which a long list of guests invited two weeks beforehand is likely to produce. They talked back and forth across the table, and laughed and joked in the unpremeditated way that an impromptu affair calls forth. Marcia glanced at her uncle once or twice in half perplexity. He seemed so entirely the careless man of the world, as he turned a laughing face to answer one of Mrs. Melville’s sallies, that she could scarcely believe he was the same man who had spoken so seriously to her a few minutes before. She glanced across at Sybert. He was smiling at some remark of the contessa’s, to which he retorted in Italian. ‘I don’t see how any sensible man can be interested in the contessa!’ was her inward comment as she transferred her attention to the young Frenchman at her side. Whenever the conversation showed a tendency to linger on politics, Mrs. Copley adroitly redirected it, as she knew from experience that the subject was too combustible by far for a dinner-party. ‘Italy, Italy! These men talk nothing but Italy,’ she complained to the young Frenchman on her right. ‘Does it not make you homesick for the boulevards?’ ‘I suffered the nostalgie once,’ he confessed, ‘but Rome is a good cure.’ Marcia shook her head in mock despair. ‘And you, too, M. Benoit! Patriotism is certainly dying out.’ ‘Not while you live,’ said her uncle. ‘Oh, I know I’m abnormally patriotic,’ she admitted; ‘but you’re all so sluggish in that respect, that you force it upon one.’ ‘There are other useful virtues besides patriotism,’ Sybert suggested. ‘Wait until you have spent a spring in the Sabine hills, Miss Copley,’ Melville put in, ‘and you will be as bad as the rest of us.’ ‘Ah, mademoiselle,’ Benoit added fervently, ‘spring-time in the Sabine hills will be compensation sufficient to most of us for not seeing paradise.’ ‘I believe, with my uncle, it’s a kind of Roman fever!’ she cried. ‘I never expected to hear a Frenchman renounce his native land.’ ‘It is not that I renounce France,’ the young man remonstrated. ‘I lofe France as much as ever, but I open my arms to Italy as well. To lofe another land and peoples besides your own makes you, not littler, but, as you say, wider—broader. We are—we are—— Ah, mademoiselle!’ he broke off, ‘if you would let me talk in French I could say what I mean; but how can one be eloquent in this halting tongue of yours?’ ‘_Coraggio_, Benoit! You are doing bravely,’ Sybert laughed. ‘We are,’ the young man went on with a sudden inspiration, ‘what you call in English, citizens of the world. You, mademoiselle, are American, La Signora Contessa is Italian, Mr. Carthrope is English, I am French, but we are all citizens of the same world, and in whatever land we find ourselves, there we recognize one another for brothers, and are always at home; for it is still the world.’