“’T is an abominable habit,” he admitted.  “I can’t tolerate it at all—­in others.  When I was Bishop of Cittareggio, I discountenanced it utterly among my clergy.  But for myself—­I need not say there are special circumstances.  Oddly enough, by the bye, at Cittareggio each separate member of my clergy was able to plead special circumstances for himself I have tried to give it up, and the effort has spoiled my temper—­turned me into a perfect old shrew.  For my friends’ sake, therefore, I appease myself with an occasional pinch.  You see, tobacco is antiseptic.  It’s an excellent preservative of the milk of human kindness.”

The friends in question kept him supplied with sound rappee.  Jests and music he was abundantly competent to supply himself.  He played the piano and the organ, and he sang—­in a clear, sweet, slightly faded tenor.  Of secular composers his favourites were “the lucid Scarlatti, the luminous Bach.”  But the music that roused him to enthusiasm was Gregorian.  He would have none other at St. Mary of the Lilies.  He had trained his priests and his people there to sing it admirably —­you should have heard them sing Vespers; and he sang it admirably himself—­you should have heard him sing a Mass—­you should have heard that sweet old tenor voice of his in the Preface and the Pater Noster.

So, then, Beatrice stood before a pier-glass, and studied her new hat; whilst the Cardinal, amused, indulgent, sat in his high-backed armchair, and watched her.

“Well—?  What do you think?” she asked, turning towards him.

“You appeal to me as an expert?” he questioned.

His speaking-voice, as well as his singing-voice, was sweet, but with a kind of trenchant edge upon it, a genial asperity, that gave it character, tang.

“As one who should certainly be able to advise,” said she.

Well, then—­” said he.  He took his chin into his hand, as if it were a beard, and looked up at her, considering; and the lines of amusement—­the “parentheses”—­deepened at either side of his mouth.  “Well, then, I think if the feather were to be lifted a little higher in front, and brought down a little lower behind—­”

“Good gracious, I don’t mean my hat,” cried Beatrice.  “What in the world can an old dear like you know about hats?”

There was a further deepening of the parentheses.

“Surely,” he contended, “a cardinal should know much.  Is it not ‘the badge of all our tribe,’ as your poet Byron says?”

Beatrice laughed.  Then, “Byron—?” she doubted, with a look.

The Cardinal waved his hand—­a gesture of amiable concession.

“Oh, if you prefer, Shakespeare.  Everything in English is one or the other.  We will not fall out, like the Morellists, over an attribution.  The point is that I should be a good judge of hats.”

He took snuff.

“It’s a shame you haven’t a decent snuff-box,” Beatrice observed, with an eye on the enamelled wooden one, cheap and shabby, from which he helped himself.