The contessa was wearing an untrimmed, black tailor-made costume with a very long train, a little fur toque to match a small neck piece, and a little sausage-shaped muff.  Her diamond earrings were enormous, but not very good stones.  Nina’s dress was of raspberry cloth, cut in the latest exaggeration of fashion—­her skirt was short and skimp as her hat was huge.  Her muff of sables as big and soft as a pillow—­she could easily have buried her arms in it to the shoulder.  The elaborateness of Nina’s clothes filled the contessa with satisfaction, for she thought them barbarously inappropriate, and she knew that Giovanni was a martinet so far as “fitness” went.

Presently, in spite of her more than rude greeting, she coolly sat down beside Nina.  “Will you make me a cup of tea?  I like it without sugar and with very little cream.”  She did not smile, and she did not say “please.”  Her bearing was a fair example of the cold, impersonal insolence of which Italian women of fashion are capable when antagonistic.

After a time she leaned over and scrutinized Nina’s watch, as though it were in a show case.  “Do many young girls in America wear jewels?”

Nina found herself congealing; instead of answering, she handed the contessa her tea, and expressed a hope that she had not put in too much cream.

Taking no notice of Nina’s evasion, the contessa, talking indiscriminately about people, arrived finally at the subject of Giovanni.  In her opinion, the Marchese di Valdo ought to marry money!  Unfortunately, however, she feared he had loved too many women to be capable now of caring for one alone.  From this she went to generalities.  A man had but one grand passion in a lifetime, didn’t Nina think so?

Nina’s thoughts were very hazy, indeed, about grand passions, which were associated dimly in her mind with the seven deadly sins—­in the category of things one didn’t speak of.  So she answered vaguely, feeling like a stupid child being cross-examined by the school commissioner.

“Still, he is very attractive, don’t you find?  Of course, he says the same things to all of us—­but then no one understands how to make love as well as he, so what does it matter whether he means it or not?  It takes a woman of great experience,” insinuated the contessa, “to parry Giovanni’s fencing with the foils of love.”

Nina was goaded into answering.  “You seem to know a great deal about his love-making,” she said at last, with the breathy calm of controlled temper.

Half shutting her eyes, the contessa replied:  “It is common hearsay.  One has only to follow the list of his conquests to know that he must be a past master in the art of making women care for him.  That he is fickle is evident; he is constantly changing his attentions from one woman to another, and leaving with a crisis of the heart her whom he has lately adored.  I am sorry for the woman he marries—­still, perhaps she would not know the difference!  He might even be devoted, from force of habit.”