Pantaleoni had dubbed him a blockhead, and he had not
lied. He turned out to be a very conceited and frothy young man with a
parting all over his head, fair to whiteness, of strikingly Northern
type, with exactly the same expressionless type of face as certain of
the milksops closely connected with the Court in Denmark.
XLIV.
There were a great many Scandinavians in Rome; they foregathered at the
various eating-houses and on a Saturday evening at the Scandinavian
Club. Some of them were painters, sculptors and architects, with their
ladies, there were some literary and scientific men and every
description of tourists on longer or shorter visits to the Eternal City.
I held myself aloof from them. Most of them had their good qualities,
but they could not stand the test of any association which brought them
into too close contact with one another, as life in a small town does.
They were divided up into camps or hives, and in every hive ruled a lady
who detested the queen bee of the next one. So it came about that the
Scandinavians lived in perpetual squabbles, could not bear one another,
slandered one another, intrigued against one another. When men got drunk
on the good Roman wine at the _osterie_, they abused one another
and very nearly came to blows. Moreover, they frequently got drunk, for
most of them lost their self-control after a few glasses.
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