Talking of some other poetical play, she asked whether it was a tragedy or not. As we seemed to hesitate, she said: “If it’s in five acts, it’s a tragedy; if it’s in four acts, it’s a drama.”
The beauty of Rome pierced me like an arrow the first day I spent there. On my first afternoon I drove to St. Peter’s, the Coliseum, the Pincio, and the Protestant cemetery, where Shelley and Keats are buried. I was not disappointed. A few days later I drove along the Appian Way into the Campagna. It was a grey day, with a slight silver fringe on the blue hills, and alone in the desolate majesty of the plain, a shepherd tootled a melancholy tune on the flute, as sad as the shepherd’s tune in the third act of _Tristan und Isolda_. As we drove back, St. Peter’s shone in a gleam of watery light, and I felt that I had now seen Rome.
It was a pleasant Embassy to serve at. Diplomatic life was different at Rome either from life in Paris or Copenhagen. Society consisted of a number of small and separate circles that revolved independently of each other, but in which the members of one circle knew what the members of all the other circles were doing. The diplomats, and there were a great number of them, were most of them an integral part of Roman society, and there were also many literary and artistic people whose circles formed part of the same system as that of the Romans and of the diplomatic world.
Lady Currie lived in a world of her own. She seemed to look on at the rest of the world from a detached and separate observation post, from which she quietly noted and enjoyed the doings of others with infinite humour and serious eyes.
She had a quiet, plaintive, half-deprecating way of saying the slyest and sometimes the most enormous things. She left it to you to take them or leave them as you chose. One day in the Embassy garden the servants had surrounded a scorpion with a ring of fire to see whether, as the legend says, it would stab itself to death. “Leave the poor salamander alone,” said Lady Currie; “it’s not its fault that it is a salamander. If it had its way it might have been an … ambassador.”
To have luncheon or dinner alone with her and Lord Currie was one of the most enjoyable entertainments in the world, when she would talk in the most unrestrained manner, and with gentle flashes of the slyest, the most cunning wit, and a deliciously funny seemingly careless but carefully chosen felicity of phrase.