Word: cabala
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Dates: during 1926-1926
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...nexus of personalities?a body of legend attaching to five extraordinary women and an ancient cardinal, whose life apart from and above modern Roman society and whose peculiar aptitudes, including the superlative one of appreciating one another, have earned them a title that falls sinister on western ears, the Cabala (clique...
...from which her guests escape with difficulty. Her private musicians fill the remaining night hours with concerts from esoteric composers, to which she listens with "the finest contrapuntal ear of her day." It is she, Elizabeth Grier, ever alert for novelty, who attaches the young New Englander to the Cabala and involves him in its members' affairs...
Cardinal Vaini, passing his 80th year among a gardenful of hobbling rabbits and the brilliant pagan writers of the new century, at his sequestered villa on the Janiculum, is an object of fear and reverence to the Vatican, of warmest affection to the Cabala. As a brilliant young theologian, he shocked his teachers by burying himself in China, a missionary with a pigtail. He built a cathedral and by sheer force of statistics won first a mitre, then the Hat. A pistol bullet fired near him by ecstatic Mile, de Morfontaine puts him in mind of how the faith...
...Duchessa D'Aquilanera, a strange ugly vessel of the haughtiest blood in Latin Europe, with an aristocratic limp, a cane between her knees and a prodigious appetite for lawsuits, concerns the Cabala less than her stripling son, who has fallen, as young Romans are expected to fall in their mid-teens, among many women, beginning with some warm young Brazilians. The New Englander is told off to inculcate hygiene in this young Marcantonio, whose passions incline also to driving highpowered motor cars and training with spasmodic vehemence to become an Olympic foot-racer. The hygienic regimen is balked by Marcantonio...