sensation—­I can’t exactly explain it, but it is as though I were not born at all.  Do you know,” she had turned to Giovanni wistfully, “I think I can understand just a little of the way you feel—­it is as though you were securely planted like a tree.  In the beginning, long ago, you were put into the earth with the first things sown.  I am merely a leaf, blown from what branch I do not even know—­belonging nowhere, coming from nothing.  I think I see for the first time what you mean, over here, but just being and not caring to do more than survive from the gloriousness of all this.”  She spread her arms out as though bewildered.

“Now you see,” Giovanni answered her, as though there were a new and strong bond of sympathy between them, “why decorations are unnecessary.  Can you imagine these walls, which for centuries have looked down upon every great personage of Rome, being decked up like a Christmas tree because a number of people whose achievements are in no way illustrious are coming for an hour or two?”

“I think,” said Nina, “that I shall dance like a wraith.  It seems almost a sacrilege to bob around and prattle in such surroundings.  How silly their sainted ghosts might think us!”

“I never thought of the old masters as saints exactly.  But come, Mademoiselle—­let us pretend—­in each of those chandeliers are burning a hundred wax candles.  It is the night of the ball—­we open it so—­will you dance?”

Again there appeared a Giovanni that she had never seen before, his lazy arrogance vanished, as, whisking a handkerchief out of his pocket to wave in his hand, he became a sprite—­a dancing faun, a reincarnation of the spirit of Donatello.

Twice he traversed the length of the gallery, and then, with a vigor added to his grace, he caught Nina and swung her with him into his whirling dance.  It had been perfectly done; even in his abandon there was no lack of ceremony.  There was none of the “come along” spirit of youth in America.  He was in this, just as he was in everything else, a remnant of a past age; he had merely been transformed into a Bacchant!  He was in no way a mere young man who had grabbed a young girl around the waist and made her dance.

But as the princess watched them, her feelings were strongly at variance.  Admiration played the greater part.  Even a much less biased mind than hers could not have failed to appreciate the wonderful grace of the man and the girl, for Nina was as graceful as he.  Yet the princess looked vaguely troubled, too, at the thought that Giovanni was perhaps overstepping his privilege.