he should come and take me next morning for a ramble about the city and bring me back to the Palace Aldobrandi for a family dinner.
I had scarcely taken twenty steps in the street when some one behind me shouted in an imperious tone:
"Don Ottavio, where are you going alone at such an hour as this?"
I turned my head and beheld a portly abbé who was staring at me with all his eyes.
"I am not Don Ottavio," I said to him.
The abbé bowed almost to the ground and was profuse in his apologies; a moment later I saw him enter the Palace Aldobrandi. I went my way, not over well pleased to have been taken for a sucking monsignor. Notwithstanding the marquise's admonitions, perhaps even because of them, one of the first things that I did was to hunt up the dwelling-place of an artist of my acquaintance, and I spent an hour in his atelier conversing with him upon the facilities for amusement, innocent or otherwise, that Rome had to offer. I turned the conversation upon the Aldobrandi.
The marquise, he told me, after having been very frivolous in her younger days, had devoted her attention to spiritual things when she saw that there were no more conquests in store for her. Her elder son was a brute who spent his time in hunting and taking care of the money that was paid in to him by the tenants of his extensive property. They were pursuing a course to make an idiot of Don Ottavio, the second son, and intended to make a cardinal of him some day. In the meanwhile he was handed over to the Jesuits. He
