His gibus slipped from his hand and rolled over the floor.
At this, the Baroness d'Isola, a tiny blonde with a cloud of fluffy curls all over her forehead, vivacious and grimacing as a young monkey, called to him in her piping voice: 'Come over here, Sakumi--here, beside me.' The Japanese cavalier advanced with a succession of bows and smiles.
'Shall we see the Princess Isse this evening ?' asked Donna Francesca d'Ateleta, who had a mania for gathering in her drawing-rooms all the most grotesque specimens of the exotic colonies of Rome, out of pure love of variety and the picturesque.
The Asiatic replied in a barbarous jargon, a scarcely intelligible compound of English, French, and Italian.
For a moment everybody was speaking at once--a chorus through which now and then the fresh laughter of the Marchesa rang like silver bells.
'I am sure I have seen you before--I cannot remember when and I cannot remember where, but I am certain I have seen you,' Andrea Sperelli was saying to the duchess as he stood before her.

'When I saw you going upstairs in front of me, a vague recollection rose up in my mind, something that took shape from the rhythm of your movements as a picture grows out of a melody.

I did not succeed in making the recollection clear, but when you turned round, I felt that your profile answered incontestably to that picture.

It could not have been a divination, therefore it must have been some obscure phenomenon of memory.

I must have seen you somewhere before--who knows--perhaps in a dream--perhaps in another world, a previous existence--' As he pronounced this last decidedly hackneyed, not to say silly remark, Andrea laughed frankly as if to forestall the lady's smile, whether of incredulity or irony.