CHAPTER XXVenetia, raising long, softly-rounded arms over a pale-gold head in a yawn of weariness, such as may be born as surely and less tolerably from idleness as from toil, wondered whether she should be called a fool.
It was a question which she had seldom felt occasion to ask in the twenty years during which the chances of changeful times, her own sharp wits, and a judicious trafficking in the beauty of her supple, milk-washed body (but there was no milk to be had here, either for glance or gold!) had raised her from Genoa’s shore-side slums to the exalted, almost respectable, position of the acknowledged mistress of a Knight-Commander of the high Order of St. John—one who was unable to give any woman a more legal name.
A year ago she did not doubt that she was the winner of a splen
