“In Venice,” she said, “the indecent movements of the Gondolieri quite affected my health, and, in consequence, I fell a prey to a sharp nervous fever. My temperature rose and it rose, ah, yes ... until I became quite ill. At last I said to my maid (she was an English girl from _Wales_, and almost equally as sensitive as me): ‘Pack.... Away!’ And we left in haste for Florence. Ah, and Florence, too, I regret to say I found very far from what it ought to have been!!! I had a window giving on the Arno, and so I could _observe_.... I used to see some curious sights! I would not care to scathe your ears, my Innocent, by an inventory of one half of the wantonness that went on; enough to say the tone of the place forced me to fly to Rome, where beneath the shadow of dear St Peter’s I grew gradually less distressed.”
“Still, I should like, all the same, to travel!” Mademoiselle de Nazianzi exclaimed, with a sad little snatch of a smile.
“We will ask the opinion of Father Geordie Picpus, when he comes again.”
“It would be more fitting,” Father Nostradamus murmured (professional rivalry leaping to his eye), “if Father Picpus kept himself free of the limelight a trifle more!”
“Often I fear our committees would be corvés without him....”
“He is very popular ... too popular, perhaps ...” the Countess admitted. “I remember on one occasion in the Blue Jesus, witnessing the Duchess of Quaranta and Madame Ferdinand Fishbacher, fight like wild cats as to which should gain his ear--(any girl might envy Father Geordie his ear)--at Confession next. The odds seemed fairly equal, until the Duchess gave the Fishbacher-woman, such a violent push--(well down from behind, in the crick of the joints)--that she overturned The Confessional Box, with Father Picpus within: and when we scared ladies, standing by, had succeeded in dragging him out, he was too shaken, naturally as you can gather, to absolve anyone else _that_ day.”
“He has been the object of so many unseemly incidents, that one can scarcely recall them all,” Father Nostradamus exclaimed, stooping to pick up a dropped pocket-handkerchief with “remembrance” knots tied to three of the corners.
“Alas.... Court life is not uplifting,” the Countess said again, contemplating her muff of _self-made_ lace, with a half-vexed forehead. What that muff contained was a constant problem for conjecture; but it was believed by more than one of the maids-in-waiting to harbour “goody” books and martyrs’ bones.