“Ah, yes!” said Mr. Keith with a sigh.  “No wonder you hesitate.  It is quite disheartening, all that drunkenness.”

CHAPTER VI

It stands to reason that the Duchess was not a Duchess at all.  She was American by birth, from some Western state, and her first husband had been an army man.  Her second spouse—­he, too, had died long ago—­was Italian.  In view of his passionate devotion to the Catholic Church and of a further payment of fifty thousand francs, he had been raised to the rank of Papal Marquis.  He died relatively young.  Had his life been spared, as it ought to have been, he might well have become a Papal Duke in course of time.  He was carried off by an accident not of his own contriving—­run over by a tramcar in Rome—­before that further ducal premium was even expected to be paid.  But for this, he ought to have died a Duke.  He would have been a Duke, by this time.

His widow, taking these things into consideration, felt it her duty to appropriate the more sonorous of the two titles open to her.  Nobody contested her claim.  All her friends, on the contrary, declared that she talked like a peeress and behaved like one; and in a world where the few remaining authentic specimens of that class fail to fulfil either the one or the other of these conditions, it was thought meet and proper that somebody should be good enough to carry on, if only in semblance, and if only in Nepenthe, the traditions of a race rapidly approaching extinction.  It was pleasant to be able to converse with a Duchess at any hour of the day, and this one was nothing if not accessible so long as you were fairly well clothed, had a reasonably supply of small talk and did not profess violent anti-papal sentiments.

Some people said she dressed like a Duchess, but there was less unanimity on this point.  Her handsome oval face and towering grey hair induced her to cultivate an antique pose, with a view to resembling “La Pompadour.”  La Pompadour stood for something courtly and powdered.  She certainly dressed better and on far less money than Madame Steynlin, whose plump figure, round sunburnt cheeks, and impulsive manner would never have done for an old-world beauty, and who cared little what frocks she wore, so long as somebody loved her.  The Duchess had all the aplomb of La Pompadour, but not much of her French accent.  Her Italian, too, was somewhat embryonic.  That mattered little.  The external impression, the grand manner, was everything.  She was not lame, though she generally leaned on somebody’s arm or a stick.  It was rather a pretty stick.  She would have worm a pomander in her hair, or on a chatelaine, if anybody had told her what a pomander was.  As her friends were unable to enlighten her—­Mr. Keith even hinting that it was an object which could not be mentioned in polite society—­she contented herself with a couple of patches.