But what a deep disappointment awaited me!

On reaching Rome we put up at a fashionable hotel in the new quarter of the Ludovisi, and although that was only a few hundred yards from the spot on which I had spent nine happy years it seemed to belong to another world altogether.  Instead of the church domes and the monastery bells, there were the harsh clang of electric trams, the thrum and throb of automobiles, the rattle of cars and the tramp of soldiers.

Then I realised that there were two Romes—­an old Rome and a new one, and that the Rome we had come to hardly differed from the Cairo we had left behind.

There was the same varied company of people of all nations, English, Americans, French, German; the same nomad tribes of the rich and dissolute, pitching their tents season by season in the sunny resorts of Europe; the same aimless society, the same debauch of fashion, the same callous and wicked luxury, the same thirst for selfish pleasures, the same busy idleness, the same corruption of character and sex.

This made me very unhappy, but from first to last Alma was in the highest spirits.  Everybody seemed to be in Rome that spring, and everybody seemed to be known either to her or to my husband.  For Alma’s sake we were invited everywhere, and thus we saw not only the life of the foreign people of the hotels but that of a part (not the better part) of the Roman aristocracy.

Alma was a great success.  She had the homage of all the men, and being understood to be rich, and having the gift of making every man believe he was her special favourite, she was rarely without a group of Italian noblemen about her chair.

With sharper eyes the Italian women saw that her real reckoning lay with my husband, but they seemed to think no worse of her for that.  They seemed to think no worse of him either.  It was nothing against him that, having married me (as everybody appeared to know) for the settlement of his financial difficulties, he had transferred his attentions, even on his honeymoon, to this brilliant and alluring creature.

As for me, I was made to realise that I was a person of a different class altogether.  When people wished to be kind they called me spirituelle, and when they were tempted to be the reverse they voted me insipid.

As a result I became very miserable in this company, and I can well believe that I may have seemed awkward and shy and stupid when I was in some of their grey old palaces full of tapestry and bronze, for I sometimes found the talk there so free (especially among the women) that the poisoned jokes went quivering through me.

Things I had been taught to think sacred were so often derided that I had to ask myself if it could be Rome, my holy and beloved Rome—­this city of license and unbelief.

But Alma was entirely happy, especially when the talk turned on conjugal fidelity, and the faithful husband was held up to ridicule.  This happened very often in one house we used to go to—­that of a Countess of ancient family who was said to have her husband and her lover at either side of her when she sat down to dinner.