“Ah, I know the place well,” I said.  “It is near to Serveti.”

“Serveti?  Is that not in the vicinity of Horace’s villa?”

“You know the country well, I see,” said I, sadly.

“I know most things,” answered the Jew, with complacency.  “You would find it hard to hit upon anything I do not know.  Yes, I am a vain man, it is true, but I am very frank and open about it.  Look at my complexion.  Did you ever see anything like it?  It is Trevi water that does it.”  I thought such excessive vanity very unbecoming in a man of his years, but I could not help looking amused.  It was so odd to hear the old fellow descanting on his attractions.  He actually took a small mirror from his pocket and looked at himself in most evident admiration.

“I really believe,” he said at length, pocketing the little looking-glass, “that a woman might love me still.  What do you say?”

“Doubtless,” I answered politely, although I was beginning to be annoyed, “a woman might love you at first sight.  But it would be more dignified for you not to love her.”

“Dignity!” He laughed long and loud, a cutting laugh, like the breaking of glass.  “There is another of your phrases.  Excuse my amusement, Signor Grandi, but the idea of dignity always makes me smile.”  He called that thing a smile!  “It is in everybody’s mouth,—­the dignity of the State, the dignity of the king, the dignity of woman, the dignity of father, mother, schoolmaster, soldier.  Psh! an apoplexy, as you say, on all the dignities you can enumerate.  There is more dignity in a poor patient ass toiling along a rough road under a brutal burden that in the entire human race put together, from Adam to myself.  The conception of dignity is notional, most entirely.  I never see a poor wretch of a general, or king, or any such animal, adorned in his toggery of dignity without laughing at him, and his dignity again leads him to suppose that my smile is the result of the pleasurable sensations his experience excites in me.  Nature has dignity at times; some animals have it; but man, never.  What man mistakes for it in himself is his vanity,—­a vanity much more pernicious than mine, because it deceives its possessor, who is also wholly possessed by it, and is its slave.  I have had a great many illusions in my life, Signor Grandi.”

“One would say, baron, that you had parted with them.”

“Yes, and that is my chief vanity,—­the vanity of vanities which I prefer to all the others.  It is only a man of no imagination who has no vanity.  He cannot imagine himself any better than he is.  A creative genius makes for his own person a ‘self’ which he thinks he is, or desires other people to believe him to be.  It makes little difference whether he succeeds or not, so long as he flatters himself he does.  He complacently takes all his images from the other animals, or from natural objects and phenomena, depicting himself bold as an eagle, brave as a lion, strong as an ox, patient as an ass,