That winter was cold in Rome, and the rain seemed endless. Even days which began fine grew suddenly dark; the wind rose, and down came a deluge. Luckily, the showers did not last. Soon the pavements dried, the clouds blew away, the sky became blue, as if smiling at an accomplished jest. The people, however, came home with their clothes drenched, their boots soaking, their chests racked with coughs and their bosoms with evil temper.

"Your famous Roman sky seems to me a lunatic asylum without any warders," said Regina to her husband; "a bedlam where the raging clouds do whatever they like."

And that rainy winter proved one of the saddest in the young wife's whole life. True, she loved Antonio; the first day he left her to resume his work she felt a profound emptiness, and knew herself henceforth attached to him as firmly as the bark to the tree. But existence in the Casa Venutelli, association with her mother-in-law, the presence of Sor Gaspare, the gloomy bedroom with those immense arm-chairs, heavy as vulgar destiny, proved altogether unbearable.

And Rome was horrible under the continuous rain, which had something malicious and mocking about it. People hurried through the streets, their faces livid; the women showed petticoat-edges pasted with mud; the heaven itself was soiled; and Regina's soul made shipwreck amid this ocean of mud and water. She would come in drenched and exasperated; within-doors it was cold; there was no fire, and there was continual annoyance. She was uncomfortable at the table in those high round chairs, opposite the sarcastic countenance of Massimo, Sor Gaspare's red visage, the enormous panting bosom of Signora Anna. At night she was worse off still on that lumpy mattress, in the cold air which was pervaded by the rumble of the trams, and the melancholy rolling of purposeless carriages.

Was this the life of Rome? Nay, was this Rome? What! This the famous Corso—this narrow, smelly, mud-splashed street, with its carriage loads of old and hideous women, its foot-passengers squashing and treading upon each other like flocks of stupid sheep? And was this St. Peter's? Regina had expected it larger. That the Pincio? It was not beautiful. The Colosseum? She had supposed it more sublime. Where were the grandeur and magnificence? She could discover neither; everything appeared melancholy and hollow. She felt no astonishment at anything except her own impressions, and found a dreary pleasure in the thought that among all the provincials who came to Rome to be overwhelmed, she alone saw things in their true light. Sometimes she made exaggerated display of her own superiority; but self-examination convinced her it was tainted by personal rancour, and she felt sadder than ever. What was it she wanted? What did she expect? She felt sick of some deep wound. In vain she told herself the winter would pass, she would soon leave this distasteful house where everything seemed to freeze and suffocate her. Alas! her own sweet home was never, never, to be found again!

After hurried visits to monuments and museums, and a promise of more leisurely re-inspection—promise made by all who fix their dwelling in Rome, and seldom fulfilled under months and years—Regina and Antonio began the (more interesting) round of appartamenti to be let.

Between the salary of the one and the dowry of the other, they counted on a fixed income of 3,000 lire. Antonio received a small addition from the Princess, who had, however, other advisers, and only consulted him in certain affairs which brought her into collision with the Treasury. The means of the young couple would not therefore allow them more than a small Apartment at fifty or sixty lire a month. They began their search in Via Massimo d'Azeglio, where a possibly suitable suite of rooms was to fall vacant in January. Regina, oppressed with doubts, entered a lordly entrance hall, from which led a principal staircase of fine marble. The second stair was perfectly dark at the bottom, but got brighter and brighter as it went up. Regina began to count its steps.

"Eleven, twenty-two, thirty-three, forty-four, fifty-five, sixty-three—you don't tell me there are more?"

She stopped, her heart beating violently. Antonio smiled indulgently; he took his little queen by the arm and helped her up; the higher they went the steeper the steps became.

"Eighty-eight; ninety-nine. Goodness! more?"

"Courage!"

"A hundred and ten!"

By the grace of God they had arrived; but before the door was opened, the trembling and panting wife had said bitterly to herself, "Is this where Regina is to live? Never! never!"

The Apartment was suitable and pretty; a real nest in the heart of the city's great forest of stone. Two windows looked out on a garden; the rest on a court none too clean.

Regina declared at once that there was no air and no light, and, in fact, that the rooms would not do at all.

"No air?" repeated Antonio; "no light? I should have said just the opposite! Look! there's a garden down there! And it's so close to my work and in the very centre of the town!"

"No. I want windows on the street."

"Well, then, we'll look for windows on the street; but, mind you, we shan't find a more comfortable little place for our rent."

"You think not?" she said, unbelievingly.

Soon she was obliged to believe. They spent a fortnight in weary pilgrimage, revolving at first about the Esquiline, the Quirinal, and the Villa Ludovisi; and Regina, half vexed, half amused, sang smilingly, Senza tetto e senza cuna (With neither roof-tree nor home). Then she became taciturn and very tired, dragging herself along with an air of desperation. They consulted a house-agent, who proved a delusion and a snare. He gave them a score of addresses, and they gradually went up the Corso exploring all the adjacent streets, as a traveller ascends a river seeking an unknown land and an undiscoverable source. Antonio would have put up with a long walk to his office if he could thus have contented Regina; but Regina would not be contented. All the suites were either too large and costly, or so cramped and cold that a single glance froze and tightened the heart. Regina saw one mezzanino (entresol) of four immense, perfectly dark rooms, inhabited by what seemed an infinite number of smartly attired young ladies. It suggested a tomb for the living, and she fled horrified. It was shocking! And this was Rome! These were the habitations which Rome offered to those who had long dreamed of her! Tombs for the living, obscure caverns, dens for slaves! A thousand times preferable the poorest cabins of the villages on the Po, full of liberty and light!

And still it rained; and Regina, unused to walking, got more and more tired as she wandered about, seeking a nest in which to fold her wounded wings. She had lost her looks, and was thin and pale; as the days passed on she became irritable. Sometimes she looked at Antonio with mocking commiseration. Was there anything more ridiculous than a fine young man dragged round by an ugly little wife, on the search for lodgings at fifty lire a month? What a wretched business was civilisation! She gazed enviously at the passers by, thinking feverishly—

"They know where to go! They have houses even if they are dens, and needn't traipse about the streets, like us, looking for a refuge. We are stray dogs, unable to find a hole to die in!"

And she looked yearningly at inaccessible country houses, thinking bitterly—

"I, too, had a home—a home full of poetry and light. I shut myself out with my own hands, and never, never will it be mine again!"

At this thought tears welled into her eyes. Weary and silent she stepped along at her husband's side, and Antonio looked at her with pity, guessing the cause of her discontent. There were times, however, when he also felt irritated. Why had she refused the Apartment in the Via d'Azeglio? What more, what better did she want?

They came in, worn out, both of them, and cross. Regina shrank away into remote regions of the big, cold bed, and Antonio sometimes heard smothered sobs which, instead of moving, vexed him all the more. What was the matter with her? Well, really now, what was it? What was the matter? Surely a sensible girl like her couldn't be crying because rooms to her fancy were not discoverable at the first go off?

"No," he told her later, "I thought you didn't love me any longer; I thought you repented having married me. I felt humiliated and wretched like a whipped child."

Regina, far away from him in the great cold bed, had a hopeless feeling of abandonment. She seemed to have lost herself in a boundless, frozen plain; the screaming breath of the tram reproduced the drive of the rain, the roar of the wet wind. All around was cloud, and only far, far, far away shone the crimson of a lighted hearth, glimmered the silver of a river——

"Why did I leave my home?" she asked herself, dully; "I've let myself be rooted up like a poplar; and now, like the poplar-wood, I've been carted here to make part of this odious construction which is called a great city. I also shall warp and rot—get worm-eaten, fall——"

Then she asked herself did she really love Antonio? There were moments when she answered "No;" other moments when she melted at the thought of him.

"I shall make him miserable! He told me what to expect in Rome; a modest life, a middle-class family. Did I not accept it? Well—well! we shall all die! We must be resigned to our destiny. Every hour will come, and the hour of death is the most certain of all. To die! To have no more suffering from homesickness—never again to see my mother-in-law, Arduina, Sor Gaspare, that maid Marina; to wander no further in the rain seeking an Apartment! No—I don't want to torment Antonio any more. Is it his fault that all the miseries of civilisation interfere between him and me? He didn't know it, and neither did I know it. But we shall all die at last! We must be resigned, and go and live in Via d'Azeglio. The days will pass there as they pass everywhere."

She slept, pleased with her philosophy; and, of course, she dreamed of the distant home, the woods, the blazing logs, the windows radiant in the sunset, the kitten on the window-sill contemplating the stem of the poplar-tree. Next morning daylight met her in the detestable Venutelli room; she lay under the incubus of the grey ceiling; she must get up, endure the cold, the rain, the company of Signora Anna! Resignation? It was very well in theory; in practice her nerves revolted fiercely against the reality.

At last, after a month of vain search, more in the end from weariness than from good-will, Regina consented to the suite in the Via d'Azeglio for one year. Yet on the very day of signing the agreement she repented, abandoning all self-control.

"Was it worth while leaving my home and coming to Rome to live in a box? I shall be suffocated! I shall die!" she cried.

Nor could Antonio longer contain himself.

"Can't you say what it is you want?" he exclaimed in a fury. "Did you imagine you were marrying a prince? You knew all I had to offer! You told me a hundred times you hadn't corrupted your soul with vain ambitions; you said you were robust and unselfish; you said you didn't ask impossible things of life! Why don't you look back instead of always looking ahead? Didn't you say you were a bit of a Socialist? Well, then, why don't you compare your condition with that of millions and millions of other women?"

She wept, leaning her forehead against the window-pane. Of course it was raining, and it seemed to her that the heavens wept with her. She knew Antonio was right, although he looked at the matter merely on its material side, and did not understand the real causes of her discontent.

However, she laughed through her tears, laughed proudly and ironically.

"If you speak like that, we are done for," she said.

He moderated his voice. "I speak crossly," he said, "but I mean well. I am tired of seeing you so dissatisfied, Regina. What do you want me to do? What can I give you beyond what I have—that is, all my work, all my love, a good position, a morrow without cares?"

"He doesn't understand," she thought; "I shall suffer, but no one shall perceive it, he least of all. I shall be always solitary. Well! I don't need any one, do I? I'm strong, am I not? Are you proposing to let your heart be seen, Regina, by all these odious little people?" And she shook her wings like a little bird which has tumbled into dirty water.

Antonio came nearer, and they made it up.

"You know," he said, stroking her hair, "the agreement is only for a year. Who knows what mayn't happen in a year? I shall apply for a rise, get a step; then we shall have our house rent free. I'll try to get extra work; perhaps Madame will put her whole affairs into my hands. Our position will improve. We'll take a larger flat—with a shorter stair. You'll get used to the stair. Some day you'll laugh at having cried for such trifles. Now wash your face. How ugly you are with those red eyes!"

"Ugly or pretty, I'm always myself!" she said, plunging her face into cold water; then she scrubbed it with the rough towel, powdered herself, put on the lace scarf, and consented to go up and visit Arduina.

They found that lady's door open, and from the vestibule her voice was heard in the drawing-room.

"Who's there?" asked Regina.

There was no one.

"What are you doing? Talking to yourself?" asked Antonio.

The authoress coloured, laughed, screamed, and confessed she was rehearsing a speech for his Excellency the Minister of Public Instruction, whom she was going to ask for a subscription for her paper.

"Does Mario know? I'll ask him what he thinks of it," said Antonio.

"For pity's sake, don't!" she cried.

"Doesn't it make you shy asking for money?" asked Regina, astonished.

"Why should I be shy? Every one does it. It's not for myself I ask—it's for the journal, which is doing terribly badly. I've asked for a subscription and an audience of the Queen. And to-morrow I must go to my uncle the Senator and learn——"

"I'd sooner die than beg from anybody!" said Regina.

"But why?" asked the other, astounded. "What harm does it do? If you were a literary woman, and ran a paper and had an idea to sustain and to make triumphant——"

"Spare us—my dear goose!" interrupted Antonio.

"And hold my tongue, I suppose? So you never ask for money? Nor take advantage of anything useful which comes in your way? Why do you stare, Regina? It's all a question of getting used to it."

"Getting used to it? That's another matter." Regina felt a flood of contemptuous words rise to her lips, but she kept silence, thinking she would not deign even to reply. She walked to the window and saw the little black-dressed woman with the seven lemons, in the corner by the shut door; but she no longer felt the melancholy this sight had waked in her on her first coming to Rome. She had got used to it.

"The Princess often asks for you," said Arduina, "won't you come to her next reception? Now you've found a house and are getting settled, you can begin to return visits and make acquaintances."

"What good are acquaintances to me?"

"What good are they to others? Don't be posing as an oddity," said Antonio, a little sharply.

"Shall I have enough drawing-room to receive them in?" returned Regina in that cold voice of hers which froze her husband's heart.

He was dismayed and silent. Arduina, however, did not understand.

"Your drawing-room will be small," she said, "that means you can't have a large circle. But you'd better come to the Princess's. It's in your husband's interest."

"No. I don't know what to make of your princesses," said Regina; but immediately she repented, remembering her vows of a few minutes before. She laughed, joked, turned everything upside down in the little drawing-room, and promised to go with Arduina to see the Senator uncle.

"I'll tell him I'm a poetess, and ask him to get me an audience of the Queen," she said gaily.

"My dear child, capital!" cried Arduina in ecstasy. "Yes! yes! we'll go together!"

But Regina made a roguish gesture, moving her hand like a fan with her thumb on the point of her nose; and the other laughed, more than ever sure that her sister-in-law was half imbecile.

Next day they went together to the distinguished uncle, who turned out only a second cousin of Arduina's mother. The authoress had dressed herself up. She wore a black dress much wrinkled on the shoulders, a yellow straw hat trimmed with poppies; a feather boa so thin and worn that people turned their heads to look at it. Regina, also in black, with her inevitable lace scarf, seemed beside her almost a beauty.

The Senator lived in Via Sistina on a fourth floor. That comforted Regina greatly. If a senator could exist on a fourth floor she might get accustomed to a fifth. Still more was she comforted when she saw the Senator's Apartment. It was very dark, and furnished with a meagreness nearer to discomfort than to simplicity. A few aspidistras, whose large leaves glistened feebly in the chiaroscuro, adorned the ante-room and the two dreary reception-rooms through which the ladies were conducted by an elderly chambermaid. There was a portrait in oils of an old man, lean and red, with protruding blue eyes and beautiful white hair (suggestive, however, of a wig), who smiled sarcastically out of his yellow background. The portrait was reflected in a cracked mirror; and the vast, dreary, dark room seemed animated by the two figures—immobile against the yellow background of the picture and the mirror—looking at each other, smiling sarcastically, sharing some half mocking, half melancholy thought.

Regina glanced at herself in the glass, and fancied that the two figures, the one in front and the one behind, had fixed their mocking eyes upon herself; then she turned suddenly, for she saw advancing silently against the yellow background of the room a third figure exactly like the other two. It was the Senator.

"Oh, brava!" he said briskly, turning to Arduina and looking at Regina.

"Let me introduce my sister-in-law," said Arduina; "she has been married one month."

"How stupid she is!" thought Regina, but had herself nothing to say when the old man congratulated her on having been married a month.

"Oh, brava! brava!" he repeated; and Arduina quickly explained the occasion of her visit.

The old Senator again said "Brava! brava!" but Regina understood perfectly that he was out of sympathy with the entire affair.

"Oh, brava! brava! It's your paper, to be sure; and devoted to the woman question?"

"No, no! Still—yes! to women's questions, properly understood."

"I see!—women's questions properly understood. Well, teach the women to work. Habituate them to the idea of work, of earning their living, of independence. When I go abroad, especially when I go to England, I am immensely struck by the 'moral physiognomy' of the women—so different from our women at home—from you——"

"But I do work!" protested Arduina.

"Your work is not sufficiently profitable if you require subscriptions!" cried Regina.

"Oh, brava! brava! And you, I suppose, write too?"

"Oh, no! I don't do anything!"

The Senator looked at her with his mocking and melancholy blue eyes; and she blushed, remembering she had never worked in her life.

"I want subscriptions," said Arduina, "because in Italy work is not yet remunerative. But in the future—the generations we shall educate——," etc., etc., etc.

She made a long speech about the future generations, and returned to her starting point: the urgent need for a subscription.

"Bless the girl! She shall have the subscription!" said the Senator, who was still looking at Regina.

"And the audience also?"

He promised the audience. At that moment he was smiling just as he smiled in the portrait and in the mirror; and Regina perceived that he pitied the poor Italian journalist and was thinking of the moral physiognomy of the working Englishwomen.

"But why the audience?" asked Regina, emboldened and imitating the Senator's smile; "subscriptions are all very well—up to a certain point—but the audience——"

"It's a moral support. With reference to my principles——"

"Yes, yes; a moral support," interrupted the Senator, still smiling.

Regina felt rebellious. This man who found the moral physiognomy of the women abroad so different from the moral physiognomy of the incapable, enslaved Italians—why did he not make Arduina understand the errors of her method?

"But," she cried, almost angrily, "if you can't do without assistance, moral or material, it's better—to do nothing at all! We are always despoilers; and it's all one if we despoil fathers, husbands, lovers, or royalty and the Government!

"My dear, you don't understand!" said Arduina, who, had not taken in Regina's meaning; "you talk like that because you've never felt the need——"

"You are from Lombardy?" asked the Senator, who, with his hands folded on his breast, amused himself twiddling his thumbs.

"I'm an incapable and useless Italian," she replied, very contemptuous of herself.

"But you are young. Why don't you write?"

"What's the use of writing," she asked, meeting his eye mockingly, "if it's only to ask for subscriptions and audiences?"

The old man, still twiddling his thumbs, rose and took a step towards the young lady.

"What's your impression of Rome?"

"Bad! It bores me! Town life is so wretched and gloomy. Besides, it does nothing but rain," said Regina, and laughed.

"What makes him stare so?" she thought; "can I possibly have the moral physiognomy of the English ladies?"

The old man stood in front of her, his back to Arduina, whose presence he seemed to have forgotten.

"Town life is wretched," he said, "because it's empty. Our women are full of useless aspirations, and, as you say, despoil their men, who deteriorate working too hard for their families. In those societies where the woman works also, the man has a free margin for the development of his abilities. In England——"

"But what can we do," repeated Regina, "if we haven't been brought up to work?"

The Senator did not appear to hear her. He drew a picture of English society where the whole middle class, the professional and the working sections alike kept themselves up in literature, art, politics, and promoted free discussion on all subjects; where the women were not bored, because they worked.

"They have hundreds of authoresses, translators, newspaper correspondents, who make more than 10,000 lire every year, some a great deal more. Mrs. H. W.—do you know how much she gets for each of her books?"

Regina did not know.

"More than seven or eight thousand pounds."

Arduina hastily made the calculation.

"More than 200,000 lire?" she said, awe-struck. "Dear me! I shouldn't like to make all that!"

"Why not?"

"Because I should go off my head!"

"But in Italy——" began Regina.

"In Italy, too, a woman may earn a great deal. Work! work! there's the secret."

Regina left the old Senator's dark and melancholy house with a new ray of light in her mind. Work! work! Yes, she also wanted work! She would begin to write. If she was no good for anything else, at least she might make some money. She wanted work; she wanted money; above all she wanted to live.

"I'll escape from this narrow circle which is strangling me. I'll look life in the face. I'll lose myself in the great streets of Rome, feel the soul of the crowd, write descriptions of the lives of the poor, of those who are bored, of those who seem happy and are not—life as it is——"

When she got home she looked round with pitying eyes. Yes! Signora Anna and the maid, Arduina and the brothers-in-law, the whole environment and the souls set in it, all moved her to pity. And this pity gave her a feeling of soft sweet warmth, of profound well-being.

Antonio had not come in, and Regina stayed in her room. She took a book and sat by the closed window. Evening came on. Little by little the warmth which had been the result of the expedition died out. The light failed. Great impalpable veils fell down round her, slowly, one after the other. The book she held in her hand was so futile that she had not been able to read two pages. She shut it up and looked at the sky. But the line of sky above the ugly opposite faÇade was so ashen and heavy that it gave her the impression of a sheet of metal. Only one little red cloud, a wandering flame, illuminated the ashes of this dead heaven.

Suddenly Regina felt a great emptiness, a great cold within herself. That little cloud had reminded her of the distant hearth fire in her home; of all the little, simple, voiceless things which yet were greater and brighter than all glory, all riches. She thought—

"Work! Money-making! Even if it were possible it couldn't give me back my home, my past, my atmosphere! One little reality is worth more than the greatest of ideals."

"What is the Ideal?" she thought further, still watching the slow passing of the cloud; and she copied the old Senator's smile, remembering how he also imagined he had such lofty ideals!