“Per Bacco!” she muttered quite audibly enough for one to overhear, “this crowd seems to think I have asked all Rome to supper!”

She attacked two young men of fashion as they entered.  Fortunately, her manner somewhat modified the rudeness of her words—­and the ill humor of her tone carried no conviction.  “You cannot come in.  I did not invite you!  I have no room!”

Instead of being angry, one, the Count Rosso, answered her in a voice that was half jesting, half conciliatory, in the familiar second person singular:  “But thou art quite mad, my dear!  We were all asked at Zizi’s supper.  I, for one, call it very ungracious of you to try to dispense with our agreeable society.”

La Favorita lapsed once more into indifference.  “Oh well, I don’t care”—­she shrugged her shoulders—­“I don’t care whether you all go or stay!”

A moment later a group that had formed at the end of the room made a great noise, and the hostess, suddenly rousing again, swept toward them with the floating motion of the professional dancer.  “I wish you to understand,” she said in a fury, “that you are to comport yourselves in my house as you would in the palaces of the nobility!”

The group fell into a half-sympathetic hush as she moved back again to the door of the entrance.  A little woman—­a cafe singer—­broke into a snatch of song: 

“The moon has two sides, a black and a white,
When the heart is dark there can be no light.”

Laughing, she snapped her fingers.  “Fava has been in a bad temper ever since that American heiress came to Rome.  She fears that Miss America will cut the leading strings of Giovanni.”

“Why pout at that?  Giovanni will then be rich—­a rich lover is better than a poor one any day!” laughed another soubrette.

“What is the matter with Fava, anyway?” put in a third.  “She was quite delighted with the American’s arrival at first.  Now she might draw a stiletto at any time.”

“The matter is that she has heard the millionairess is pretty, and she fears she will take Giovanni’s heart as well as his name!”

“Fava jealous!  A delicious thought that!  Yet I am not sure that I should care to be in Giovanni’s shoes if he wants to get away from her,” observed Rigolo, the actor.

Favorita again swept toward the group, her voice strident:  “Per Dio! Do you suppose I can’t imagine what you are all talking about, with your long ears together like so many donkeys chewing in a cabbage patch?  You need not imagine to yourselves that I am jealous.  No novice could hold Giovanni long.  It is I who can tell you that, for I know such men and their ways fairly well—­I have had experience!  Me!”