And the passing of this “relic of old dacincy,” the shabby genteel of the earth from Rome—­even if the passing is a temporary social phenomenon, has a curious symbolic timeliness, coming when the working class is rising.  It leaves Rome almost as middle class as Kansas City and Los Angeles!  For in Rome one feels that the upper class, the ruling class of other centuries, is weaker than it is elsewhere in the world.  They tell you flippantly that the king is training his son to run for president.  The high caste Romans have an Austrian pride, that “goeth before destruction.”  For politically their power is sadly on the wane.  They are miserably moth-eaten compared to our own arrogant princes of Wall Street or even compared to the dazed dukes and earls of England, who are looking out at the wreck of matter and the crash of worlds about them.  One feels vaguely that these Italian nobles are passing through a rather mean stage of decay.  For a time during the latter part of the last century and during the first decade of this century, the Italian noblemen tried to edge into business.  They lent their names to promotion schemes, and the schemes, upon the whole, turned out badly, and the people learned to distrust all financial schemes under noble patronage; so the nobility is going to work.  A few strong families remain—­the present royal house of Savoy is among the strong ones.

Our business led us to a call on the Duke of Genoa, uncle to the King, who in the King’s absence at the front with his soldiers, was a sort of acting king on the job in Rome.  The automobile took us into the first court of the Royal Palace.  Now the Royal Palace—­save for a few executive offices—­has been turned into an army hospital and we saw doctors and nurses dodging in and out of the innumerable corridors, and smelled iodoform everywhere.  A major domo, in scarlet, who seemed in the modern disinfected smell of the place like the last guard of mediaevalism, greeted us as we alighted from our car; a great, powerful soldier he was, with white and gold on his scarlet broadcloth.  He showed us into a passage where the minister waited who was to take us to the Duke.  The minister led us down a long stately gallery, out of the twentieth century into the fifteenth, where at the end of the gallery a most remarkably caparisoned servant stood at attention.  He wore a scarlet coat of unimaginable vividness, a cut-away coat of glaring scarlet broadcloth.  But we could have passed that easily enough.  The thing that held us was his blue plush knee breeches.  It didn’t seem fitting that a man in this age of work and wisdom should wear shimmering blue plush knee breeches for everyday.  He was a big fellow and puffy.  And the scarlet coat and blue breeches certainly gave the place an olden golden air.  But alas!  The twentieth century burst in.  For he bowed us to an elevator—­a modern Chicago elevator inspected by an accident company, guaranteeing the passengers against injuries!