of Castleman County. He had taken Sylvia to show her the sights of
Berlin, and had rolled her down the "Sieges Allée," making
outrageous fun of his Kaiser's taste in art, and coming at last to a
great marble column, with a female figure representing Victory upon
the top. "You will observe," said the cultured young plutocrat,
"that the Grecian lady stands a hundred meters in the air, and has
no stairway. There is a popular saying about her which is
delightful--that she is the only chaste woman in Berlin!"

I had been through the culture-seeking stage, and knew my Henry
James; so I could read between the lines of Sylvia's experiences. I
figured her as a person walking on volcanic ground, not knowing her
peril, but vaguely disquieted by a smell of sulphur in the air. And
once in a while a crack would open in the ground! There was the Duke
of Something in Rome, for example, a melancholy young man, with whom
she had coquetted, as she did, in her merry fashion, with every man
she met. Being married, she had taken it for granted that she might
be as winsome as she chose; but the young Italian had misunderstood
the game, and had whispered words of serious import, which had so
horrified Sylvia that she flew to her husband and told him the
story--begging him incidentally not to horse-whip the fellow. In
reply it had to be explained to her she had laid herself liable to
the misadventure. The ladies of the Italian aristocracy were severe
and formal, and Sylvia had no right to expect an ardent young duke
to understand her native wildness.

11. Something of that sort was always happening--something in each
country to bewilder her afresh, and to make it necessary for her
husband to remind her of the proprieties. In France, a cousin of van
Tuiver's had married a marquis, and they had visited the chateau.