Stenterello thrust out his paw and gave four short, shrill barks; upon which the elder lady turned round and raised her forefinger.

“My dear, my dear, remember where you are!  Excuse my foolish child,” she added, turning to Roderick with an agreeable smile.  “She can think of nothing but her poodle.”

“I am teaching him to talk for me,” the young girl went on, without heeding her mother; “to say little things in society.  It will save me a great deal of trouble.  Stenterello, love, give a pretty smile and say tanti complimenti!” The poodle wagged his white pate—­it looked like one of those little pads in swan’s-down, for applying powder to the face—­and repeated the barking process.

“He is a wonderful beast,” said Rowland.

“He is not a beast,” said the young girl.  “A beast is something black and dirty—­something you can’t touch.”

“He is a very valuable dog,” the elder lady explained.  “He was presented to my daughter by a Florentine nobleman.”

“It is not for that I care about him.  It is for himself.  He is better than the prince.”

“My dear, my dear!” repeated the mother in deprecating accents, but with a significant glance at Rowland which seemed to bespeak his attention to the glory of possessing a daughter who could deal in that fashion with the aristocracy.

Rowland remembered that when their unknown visitors had passed before them, a year previous, in the Villa Ludovisi, Roderick and he had exchanged conjectures as to their nationality and social quality.  Roderick had declared that they were old-world people; but Rowland now needed no telling to feel that he might claim the elder lady as a fellow-countrywoman.  She was a person of what is called a great deal of presence, with the faded traces, artfully revived here and there, of once brilliant beauty.  Her daughter had come lawfully by her loveliness, but Rowland mentally made the distinction that the mother was silly and that the daughter was not.  The mother had a very silly mouth—­a mouth, Rowland suspected, capable of expressing an inordinate degree of unreason.  The young girl, in spite of her childish satisfaction in her poodle, was not a person of feeble understanding.  Rowland received an impression that, for reasons of her own, she was playing a part.  What was the part and what were her reasons?  She was interesting; Rowland wondered what were her domestic secrets.  If her mother was a daughter of the great Republic, it was to be supposed that the young girl was a flower of the American soil; but her beauty had a robustness and tone uncommon in the somewhat facile loveliness of our western maidenhood.  She spoke with a vague foreign accent, as if she had spent her life in strange countries.  The little Italian apparently divined Rowland’s mute imaginings, for he presently stepped forward, with a bow like a master of ceremonies.  “I have not done my duty,” he said, “in not announcing these ladies.  Mrs. Light, Miss Light!”