“Signor Malipieri,” said the Baron to Sabina, as they went in to dinner, “is the celebrated archaeologist.”

“Yes,” Sabina answered, as if she knew all about him, though she had never heard him mentioned.

Malipieri probably overheard the Baron’s speech, but he took no notice of it.  At dinner, he seemed inclined to be silent.  The Baron asked him questions about his discoveries, to which he gave rather short answers, but Sabina gathered that he had found something extraordinary in Carthage.  She did not know where Carthage was, and did not like to ask, but she remembered that Marius had sat there among some ruins.  Perhaps Malipieri had found his bones, for no one had ever told her that Marius did not continue to sit among the ruins to his dying day.  She connected him vaguely with AEneas and another person called Regulus.  It was all rather uncertain.

What she saw clearly was that the Baron wished to make Malipieri feel at his ease, but that Malipieri’s idea of being at his ease was certainly not founded on a wish to talk about himself.  So the conversation languished for some time.

The Baroness, who knew about as much about Carthage as Sabina, made a few disconnected remarks, interspersed with laudatory allusions to the young man’s immense learning, for she wished to please her husband, though she had not the slightest idea why Malipieri was asked to dinner.  Finding that he was not perceptibly flattered by what she said, she began to talk about the Venetian aristocracy, for she knew that his name was historical, and she recognized in him at once the characteristics of the nobility she worshipped.  Malipieri smiled politely, and in answer to a direct question admitted that his mother had been a Gradenigo.

The Baroness was delighted at this information.

“To think,” she said, “that by a mere accident you and Donna Sabina should meet here, the descendants of two of the oldest families of the Italian aristocracy!”

“I am a republican,” observed Malipieri quietly.

“You!” cried the Baroness in amazement.  “You, the offspring of such races as the Malipieri and the Gradenigo a republican, a socialist, an anarchist!”

“There is a difference,” said Malipieri with a smile.  “A republican is not an anarchist!”

“I can never believe it,” answered the Baroness solemnly.

She ate a few green peas and shook her head.

“I went to Carthage because I was condemned to three years’ confinement in prison,” replied Malipieri with calm.

“Prison!” exclaimed the Baroness in horror, and she looked at her husband, mutely asking why in the world he had brought a convict to their table.

The Baron smiled benignly, as he disposed of an ample mouthful of green peas, before he spoke.

“Signor Malipieri,” he said, when he had swallowed the last one, “founded and edited a republican newspaper in the north of Italy.”