Quickly as she had entered, she was gone again, into the elevator and down to join her mother.

“Really, Nina,” Mrs. Randolph said as soon as her daughter was seated, “I can’t see what you want to go to Rome for.  I am sure it’s more comfortable here.  I hate visiting, myself.”  As she spoke she set straight a piece of silver that to her critical eye seemed an eighth of an inch out of line.

“But, Mamma, you know how keen I have always been to see Aunt Eleanor’s home.  Being with her can hardly seem visiting; and Uncle Sandro——­”

“What your aunt ever saw in Sandro Sansevero,” interrupted her mother, “I’m sure I can’t imagine.  He’s always bobbing and bowing and gesticulating, and he talks broken English.  He makes me nervous!  I’d infinitely rather be without a title than have it at that price.”

“You have always told me that theirs was a love match, that Aunt Eleanor did not marry him for his title.”

“That is just the senseless part of it!” Mrs. Randolph retorted with a fine disregard for consistency.  “If she had married him for his name—­which, after all, is a good one, although princes are as common in Italy as ‘misters’ are here—­that would have been one thing.  But she was actually in love with him!  She is yet, so far as I can see!”

Nina burst out laughing, and, as though catching the infection, Mrs. Randolph laughed too.  They were interrupted by the butler’s announcing “Mr. Derby!”

John Derby was a young man of twenty-five, broad shouldered and well over six feet.  His features were a little too rugged to be strictly handsome, but his spare frame was as muscular as that of a young gladiator.  So much at least our colleges do for the sons we send to them.  John Derby had made both the ’Varsity eight and the eleven; he had been a young god at the end of June when, captain of the victorious boat, his classmates had borne him on their shoulders to their club-house.  That night there had been toasting and speeches and what not—­he was a very “big man” of a very big university; and perhaps nothing that life might ever give him in the future could overshadow this experience.

All hail to the victor—­and glorious be his remembrances.  Exit our Greek god at the end of June, to be replaced by a young American citizen about the first of July—­one small atom who thinks to make the same sized mark on the great plain of life that he made on the college campus.  All the same, there were good clean ideals back of John Derby’s blue eyes, and fresh, healthy young blood surged through his veins.  What is the world for, if not for such as he to conquer?

Thousands had called “Derby!  Derby!  Go it, Derby!” when he made his famous sixty-yard run down the gridiron.  Yet it is well to remember that the victory came at the end of ten years’ training at school and college, after many bruises, some dislocations, and not a few breaks.  With such discipline, there was after all no reason to wonder that he donned overalls and went to a desolate settlement of brick chimneys, smelters, and shack dwellings, set on the sides of hills, which, because of sulphurous fumes, were bleak as sandhills in Sahara.