danger of being totally bald. He had done for himself what others
would not allow him to do for them, a proceeding which affords some
virtuous people boundless satisfaction, though it procured him none at
all. He was provided for in his old age. During more than thirty years
he had saved and scraped and invested and added to the little sum of
money left him by his father, an honest old notary of the old school,
until he possessed what was a very comfortable competence for a
childless old man. He had a small house of his own near the Pantheon,
in which he occupied two rooms, letting the rest, and he had a hundred
thousand francs in government bonds, besides a few acres of vineyard
on the slope of Monte Mario.

More than once, in the sincerity of his devotion to the family he
served, he had thought of sacrificing all he possessed in an attempt
to stave off final ruin; but a very little reflection had convinced
him that all he had would be a mere drop in the flood of extravagance,
and would forthwith disappear with the rest into the bottomless pit of
debt.

Even that generous temptation was gone now. The house having
collapsed, its members appeared to him only in their true natures, a
good-for-nothing young man, tainted with a mortal disease, a foolish
mother, a devout spinster threatened with religious mania, and the
last descendant of the great old race, one little girl-child not
likely to live, and perhaps better dead. In their several ways they
had treated him as the contemptible instrument of their inclinations;
they were gone from his life and he was glad of it, when he thought of
each one separately. Yet, collectively, he wished them all in the
palace again, even a month ago, even on the day before the exodus;
good, bad, indifferent, no matter what, they had been Casa Conti