It was a matter that demanded leisure and a quiet mind.
As he sat sipping Miss Manisty's tea, however, nothing could be divined of those scathing Latin sheets on which he had left his secretary employed.

He had the air of one at peace with all the world--hardly stirred indeed by the brilliance of his host.
'Italy again!'-- said Reggie Brooklyn in Lucy's ear--poor old Italy!--one might be sure of that, when one sees one of these black gentlemen about.' The Cardinal indeed had given Manisty his text.

He had brought an account of some fresh vandalism of the Government--the buildings of an old Umbrian convent turned to Government uses--the disappearance of some famous pictures in the process, supposed to have passed into the bands of a Paris dealer by the connivance of a corrupt official.
The story had roused Manisty to a white heat.

This maltreatment of religious buildings and the wasting of their treasures was a subject on which he was inexhaustible.

Encouraged by the slow smile of the Cardinal, the laughter and applause of the young men, he took the history of a monastery in the mountains of Spoleto, which had long been intimately known to him, and told it,--with a variety, a passion, an irony, that only he could achieve--that at last revealed indeed to Lucy Foster, as she sat quivering with antagonism beside Miss Manisty, all the secret of the man's fame and power in the world.
For gradually--from the story of this monastery, and its suppression at the hands of a few Italian officials--he built up a figure, typical, representative, according to him, of the New Italy, small, insolent, venal,--insulting and despoiling the Old Italy, venerable, beautiful and defenceless.