Vandervelde. She
felt as if she were teaching and training an unspoiled, delighted,
and delightful child, and contact with this fresh and eager spirit
stimulated her own.
Many of her former school friends, girls belonging to fine
Florentine families, some now noble matrons, mothers of families,
one or two great conventual superioresses, still resided in the
city, and these welcomed their beloved Marcia delightedly. There
were, too, the American and English colonies, and a coterie of
well-known artists. Marcia Vandervelde was a born hostess, a center
around which the brightest and cleverest naturally revolved. She
changed the large, drafty rooms of the old palace into charming
reflections of her own personality. A woman of wide sympathies and
cultivated tastes, she delighted in the clever cosmopolitan society
that gathered in her drawing-room; and it was in this opalescent
social sea that she launched young Mrs. Champneys.
Mrs. Champneys was at first but a mild success, a sort of pale
luminosity reflected from the more dominant Mrs.
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