There was, for instance, the young son of a German steel-king, a
person of amazing savoir faire, who had made bold to write books and
exhibit pictures, and had travelled so widely that he had even heard
of Castleman County. He had taken Sylvia to show her the sights of
Berlin, and had rolled her down the "Sieges All?e," making
outrageous fun of his Kaiser's taste in art, and coming at last to a
great marble column, with a female figure representing Victory upon
the top. "You will observe," said the cultured young plutocrat,
"that the Grecian lady stands a hundred meters in the air, and has
no stairway. There is a popular saying about her which is
delightful--that she is the only chaste woman in Berlin!"
I had been through the culture-seeking stage, and knew my Henry
James; so I could read between the lines of Sylvia's experiences. I
figured her as a person walking on volcanic ground, not knowing her
peril, but vaguely disquieted by a smell of sulphur in the air. And
once in a while a crack would open in the ground! There was the Duke
of Something in Rome, for example, a melancholy young man, with whom
she had coquetted, as she did, in her merry fashion, with every man
she met.
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