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Maria asked her friend Giuliana Parenzo to lunch with her the next day. If Baldassare Castiglione came at three o'clock, and if it seemed wiser not to refuse him the door outright, he should at least not find her alone.
The Countess occupied one floor of a rather small house in the broad Via San Martino, near the railway station. It was a sunny apartment, furnished very simply but very prettily. After her husband had left her she had declined to accept any allowance from him and had moved out of the old palace, in which the state apartment was now shut up, while the rest of the great building was now occupied by a cardinal, an insurance company, and a rich Chicago widow. Maria lived on her own fortune, which was not large, but was enough, as she had been an only child and both her parents were dead.