Next day Antonio went to the Princess about the collection of her rents. She invited him and his wife to dinner on Sunday, and this invitation was followed by others. Regina accepted them all, but unwillingly. The dinners were magnificent, served by pompous men servants, whose solemnity, said Antonio, spoiled his digestion. Regina found the entertainments dull, and came away out of temper. The guests were elderly foreigners or obscure Italian poets and artists; their conversation might have been interesting, for it touched on letters, art, the theatre, matters of palpitating contemporary life, but only stale commonplaces were uttered, and Regina heard nothing at all correspondent to the ideas sparkling in her own mind.

She was bored; yet no sooner was she back in the atmosphere of Casa Venutelli than she thought enviously of the Princess's saloons, where the servants passed and waited, silent and automatic as machines, where all was beauty, luxury, splendour, and the light itself seemed to shine by enchantment.

At last the day came when Antonio and his wife chose the furniture for their own Apartment in Via Massimo d'Azeglio.

"We'll go on Sunday and settle how to arrange it," said Antonio, and Regina thought dolefully of all the fatigue and worry awaiting her.

"Fancy coping with a servant!" she reflected, panic-struck.

On Sunday morning they went to their little habitation. It was late in January, a pure, soft morning with whiffs of spring in the air. Regina ran up the hundred-odd steps, and when, panting and perspiring, she arrived at her hall door she amused herself by ringing the bell.

"Tinkle, tinkle, tinkle! Who is there? Mr. Nobody! What fun going to visit Mr. Nobody!"

Antonio opened with a certain air of mystery and marched in first. Then he turned and made Regina a low bow. She looked round astonished, and exclaimed, with faint irony, "But I thought this kind of thing only happened in romances!"

The Apartment was all in complete order. Curtains veiled the half-open windows. The large white bed stood between strips of carpet, upon which were depicted yellow dogs running with partridges in their mouths. Even in the kitchen nothing was missing or awry.

Antonio stood at the window, leaving Regina time to get over her surprise. She hated herself because somehow she did not feel all the pleasurable emotion which her husband might justly expect of her. However, she understood quite well what she must do. She thought—

"I must kiss him and say, 'How good you are!'"

So she did kiss him, and said "How good you are!" quite cheerfully. His eyes filled with boyish delight, and at sight of this she felt touched in earnest.

"Antonio," she cried, "you really are good, and I am very wicked. But I'm going to improve, I really, really am!"

And for a week or a fortnight she was good; docile and even merry. She was very busy settling her treasures in the cabinets, her clothes in the wardrobes, altering this table and that picture; never in her whole life had she worked so hard! The first night she slept in the soft new bed, between the fine linen sheets of her trousseau, she felt as if delivered from an incubus, and about to begin a new life, with all the happiness, all the renewed energy of a convalescent. By this time fine weather had come. The Roman sky was cloudless; springtime fragrance filled the air; the city noises reached Regina's rooms like the sound of a distant waterfall, subdued and sweet. In the sun-dappled garden below, a thin curl of water was flung by a tiny fountain into a tiny vase, dotted with tiny goldfish; monthly roses bloomed; and a couple of white kittens chased each other along the paths. The little garden seemed made expressly for the two graceful little beasts.

Regina passed several happy days. But when all the things were safely installed in the wardrobes and cabinets she found she had nothing more to do. The servant, of whom she had thought with so much dread, looked after everything, was well behaved and prettily mannered. She was an expense, but worth it. Regina's only worry was making out the account for the maid's daily purchases. She got used even to this; and again began to be bored. She stood before her glass for long hours, brushing, washing and dressing her hair, polishing her nails and teeth. She looked at herself in profile, from this side and that, powdered her face, took to using "Crema Venus," laced herself very tight. But afterwards, or indeed at the moment, she asked with impatient and disgusted self-reproach, "Are you a fool, Regina? What's all this for? What on earth is the good of it?"

Of her few visitors, almost all were tiresome relations; among them Aunt Clara and Claretta. Aunt Clara, jealous of Arduina's aristocratic acquaintances, had much to relate of banquets and receptions at which she had assisted.

"And Claretta, as I need not say——"

Claretta admired herself in all the mirrors, ransacked Regina's toilet-table, passed through the little Apartment like the wind, upsetting everything. Regina hated the mother, hated the daughter, hated the whole connection, including Arduina, who nevertheless took her about, introducing her to countesses and duchesses at whose houses she met others of like rank.

"It's appalling the number of countesses in Rome," said Regina to her husband.

She was partly amused, partly wearied; she was not offended when the grand ladies failed to return her visits; and she no longer wondered at the shocking things said in almost all the drawing-rooms about the people most distinguished in the literary, the political, and even in the private world.

"Anything is possible," said Marianna, "and what is most possible of all is that the things they say are calumnies."

In the early spring Regina had a recrudescence of nostalgia and discontent. The little Apartment began to be hot. She stood for hours at the window with the nervous unquiet of a bird not yet used to its cage. From the "Pussies' Garden" rose a smell of damp grass which induced in her spasms of homesickness. Sometimes she looked down through her eye-glass, and saw a certain short and plump, pale and bald young man, strolling round and round the little vase into which the fountain wept tears of tedium. Life was tedious also for that young man. Regina remembered seeing him on the evening of San Stefano in a box at the Costanzi, his face bloated and yellow as an unripe apricot; and she had included him in her incendiary hatred. Now he, too, was bored. Was he bored because he had come down into the garden, or had he come down into the garden because he was bored? Sometimes he stood and teased the goldfish; then he yawned and battered the flowers with his stick, the wistaria on the walls, the monthly roses, the innocent daisies.

"He must beat something," thought Regina, and remembered that she herself was itching to torment any one or anything. On rainy days—frequent and tedious—she became depressed, even to hypochondria. Only one thought comforted her—that of the return to her home. She counted the days and the hours. Strange, childish recollections, distant fancies, passed through her mind like clouds across a sad sky. Details of her past life waked in her melting tenderness; she remembered vividly even the humblest persons of the place, the most secret nooks in the house or in the wood; with strange insistence she thought of certain little things which never before had greatly struck her. For instance, there was an old millstone, belonging to a ruined mill, which lay in the grass by the river-side. The remembrance of that old grey millstone, resting after its labour beside the very stream with which it had so long wrestled, moved Regina almost to tears. Often she tried to analyse her nostalgia, asking herself why she thought of the millstone, of the old blind chimney sweep, of the portiner (ferryman), who had enormous hairy hands and was getting on for a hundred; of the clean-limbed children by the green ditch, intent on making straw ropes; of the little snails crawling among the leaves of the plane-trees.

"I am an idiot!" she thought; yet with the thought came a sudden rush of joy at the idea of soon again seeing the millstone, the ferryman, the children, the green ditches, and the little snails.

And outside it rained and rained. Rome was drowned in mire and gloom. Regina raged like a furious child, wishing that upon Rome a rain of mud might fall for evermore, forcing all the inhabitants to emigrate and go away. Then, then she would return to her birth-place, to the wide horizons, the pure flowing river of her home; she would be born anew, she would be Regina once more, a bird alive and free!

Antonio went out and came in, and always found her wrapped in her homesick stupor, indifferent to everything about her.

"Let's take a walk, Regina!"

"Oh, no!"

"It would do you good."

"I am quite well."

"You can't be well. You are so dull. You don't care for me, that's what it is!"

"Oh, yes, I do! And if I don't, how can I help it?"

Sometimes, indeed, she included even Antonio in the collective hatred which she nourished against everything representative of the city. At those moments he seemed an inferior person, bloodless and half alive, one among all the other useless phantasms scarce visible in the rain, through which she alone in her egotism and her pride loomed gigantic.

But the warm and luminous spring came at last, and troops of men, women and flower-laden children spread themselves through the streets, in the depths of which Regina's short-sighted eyes fancied silvery lakes. In the fragrant evenings, bathed it would seem in golden dust, companies of women, fresh as flowers in their new spring frocks, came down by Via Nazionale, by the Corso, by Via del Tritone. Carriages passed heaped up with roses, red motor-cars flew by, bellowing like young monsters drunk with light, and even they were garlanded with flowers.

Regina walked and walked, on Antonio's arm, or sometimes alone; alone among the crowd, alone in the wave of all those joyous women, whose thoughtlessness she both envied and despised; alone among the smiling parties of sisters, companions, friends, by not one of whom, however, would she have been accompanied for anything in the world! One day, as she was going up Piazza Termini, she saw Arduina in the famous black silk dress with wrinkles on the shoulders. Regina would have avoided her sister-in-law, but did not set about it soon enough.

"I've been to your house," said Arduina; "why are you never at home? it's impossible to catch you. What are you always doing? Where have you been? Even our mother complains of you. Why don't you have a baby?"

"Why don't you? And where are you going?" said Regina, with sarcasm.

"I'm going to the Grand Hotel, to see a very rich English 'miss.' You can come too, if you like. She's worth it!"

Regina went, so anxious was she for something to do. The sunset tinged the Terme and the trees with orange-red. From the gardens came the cry of children and twitterings like the rustling of water from innumerable birds. Higher than all else, above the transparent vastness of the Piazza, above the fountain, which clear, luminous, pearly, seemed an immense Murano vase, towered the Grand Hotel, its gold-lettered name sparkling on its front like an epigraph on the faÇade of a temple.

There was a confusion of carriages before the columns of the entrance, of servants in livery, of gentlemen in tall hats, of fashionably attired ladies. A royal carriage with glossy, jet-black horses, was conspicuous among the others.

"It must be the Queen," said Arduina. "I'd like to wait!"

"Good-bye to you, then," returned her sister-in-law, "where there is one Regina there's no room for another!"

"Good heavens! what presumption!" laughed the other. "Well, then, come on."

Arduina led the way through the carriages and through the smart crowd which animated the hall; then humbly inquired of a waiter if Miss Harris were at home. The waiter bent his head and listened, but without looking at the two ladies.

"Miss Harris? I think she's at home. Take a seat," he replied absently, his eyes on the distance.

Regina remembered Madame Makuline's awe-inspiring servants; this man provoked not only awe, but a sort of terror. They went into the conservatory, and Arduina looked about with respectful admiration. The younger lady was silent, lost in the dream world she saw before her.

Apparently they had intruded into a fÊte. A strange light of ruddy gold streamed from the glass roof; among the palm-trees, treading on rich carpets, was a phantasmagoria of ladies dressed in silks and satins, with long rustling trains, their heads, ears, necks, brilliant with jewels. Bursts of laughter and the buzz of foreign voices mixed with the rattle of silver and the ring of china cups. It was a palace of crystal; a world of joy, of fairy creatures unacquainted with the realities of life, dwelling in the enchantment of groves of palms, rosy in the light of dream!

"The realities of life!" thought Regina, "but is not this the reality of life? It's the life of us mean little people which is the ugly dream!"

Just then a splendid creature, robed in yellow satin, who, as she passed, left behind her the effulgence of a comet, crossed the conservatory, and stopped to speak to two ladies in black.

"It's Miss Harris!" whispered Arduina; "she's coming!"

Regina had never imagined there could exist a being so beautiful and luminous. She watched her with dilated eyes, while from the far end of the conservatory breathed slow and voluptuous music overpowering the voices, the laughter, the rattle of the cups. Miss Harris drew nearer. Regina's eyes grew wild, she was overpowered by almost physical torture, by burning sadness. The rosy sunset light brooding over the palms as in an Oriental landscape, the warmth, the scent, the music, the dazzling aspect of the wealthy foreigner, all produced in her a kind of nostalgia, the atavic recollection of some wondrous world, where all life was pleasure and from which she had been exiled. Ah! at that moment she realised quite clearly what was the ill disease gnawing at her vitals! Ah! it was not the regret, the nostalgia for her early home, for her childish past; it was the death of the dreams which had filled that past, dreams which had perfumed the air she had breathed, the paths she had trod, the place where she had dwelt: dreams which were no fault of her own because born with her, transmitted in her blood, the blood of a once dominant race.

Miss Harris approached the corner where sat the two little bourgeois ladies, trailing her long shining train, her whole elegant slimness suggesting something feline. The two foreign ladies accompanied her talking in incomprehensible French. Arduina had to get up and smile very humbly before the Englishwoman recognised her, shook her hand, and spoke with condescending affability. Then Miss Harris sat down, her long tail wound round her legs like that of a reposing cat, and began to talk. She was tired and bored; she had been for a drive in a motor, had had a private audience of the Pope, and in half-an-hour was due at some great lady's reception. She did not look at Regina at all. After a minute she appeared to forget Arduina; a little later, the two foreign ladies also. She seemed talking for her own ears; in her beauty and splendour she was self-sufficient, like a star which scintillates for itself alone. From far and near everybody watched her.

Regina trembled with humiliation. In her modest short frock she felt herself disappearing; she was ashamed of her lace scarf; when Miss Harris offered her a cup of tea she repulsed it with an inimical gesture. She felt again that sense of puerile hatred which had assaulted her at the Costanzi on the evening of San Stefano.

As they left the hotel she said to her sister-in-law, "I can't think what you came for! Why are you so mean-spirited? Why did you listen so slavishly to that woman who hardly noticed your presence?"

"But weren't you listening quite humbly, too?"

"I? I'd like to have seized and throttled you all! Good God, what fools you women are!"

"My dear Regina," said the other, confounded, "I don't understand you!"

"I know you don't. What do you understand? Why do you go to such places? What have you to do with people like that? Don't you take in that they are the lords of the earth and we the slaves?"

"But we're the intelligent ones! We are the lords of the future! Don't you hear the clatter of our wooden shoes going up and of their satin slippers coming down?"

"We? What, you?" said Regina, contemptuously.

"Mind that carriage!" cried Arduina, pulling her back.

"You see? They drive over us! What's the good of intelligence? What is intelligence compared with a satin train?"

"Oh, I see! You're jealous of the satin train," said the other, laughing good-humouredly.

"Oh, you're a fool!" cried Regina, beside herself.

"Thanks!" said Arduina, unoffended.

Returned home, Regina threw herself on the ottoman in the ante-room, and remained there nearly an hour, beating the devil's tattoo with her foot in time to the ticking of the clock, which seemed the heart of the little room. Her own heart was overflown by a wave of humiliating distress. Ah! even the ridiculous Arduina had guessed what ailed her.

Daylight was dying in the adjacent room, and the dining-room, which looked out on the courtyard, was already overwhelmed in heavy shadow. The open door made a band of feeble light across the passage of the ante-room, while in its angles the penumbra continually darkened. Watching it, Regina reflected.

"The penumbra! What a horrid thing is the penumbra! Horrid? No, it's worse! It's noxious—soul-stifling! Better a thousand times the full shadow, complete darkness. In the shadow there is grief, desperation, rebellion—all that is life; but in this half-light it's all tedium, want, agony. It's better to be a beggar than a little bourgeois. The beggar can yell, can spit in the face of the prosperous. The little bourgeois is silent; he's a dead soul, he neither can nor ought to speak. What does he want? Hasn't he got the competence already, which some day every one is to have? His share is already given to him. If he asks for more he's called ambitious, egotistic, envious. Even the idiots call him so! Satin trains—green and shining halls like gardens spread out in the sun—motors like flying dragons! And the gardens, the beautiful gardens 'half seen through little gates,' country houses hidden among pines, like rosy women under green lace parasols! That should be the heritage of the future, of the to-morrow, promised us though not yet come. But no! all that is to disappear! The world is small and can't be divided into more than two parts, the day and the night, the light and the shade. But some day it's to be all penumbra! Every one's to be like us, every one's to live in a little dark Apartment with interminable stairs; all the streets are to be dusty, overrun by smelly trams, by troops of middle-class women who will go about on foot, dressed with sham elegance, wearing mock jewellery, carrying paper fans; joyous with a pitiable joy. The whole world will be tedium and destitution. The beggars won't have attained to the dreams which made them happy; the children of the rich will live on nostalgia, remembering the dream which was once reality to them. What will be the good of living then? Why am I living now?"

Then suddenly she remembered three figures, all exactly alike; three figures of an old man in a dreary room, who smiled and looked at each other with humorous sympathy, like three friends who understand without need of words. Work! Work! There's the secret of life!

The voice of the old Senator resounded still in Regina's soul. Since seeing him she had learned his story; his wife, a beautiful woman, brilliant and young, had killed herself, for what reason none could say. Work! Work! That was the secret! Perhaps the old Senator, panegyrising the working woman, had been thinking of his wife who had never worked.

Work! This was the secret of the world's future. All would eventually be happy because all would work.

"No! I don't represent the future as I have fondly fancied. I belong to the present—very much to the present! I am the parasite par excellence. I eat the labour of my husband, and I devour his moral life as well, because he loves me—loves me too much. I don't even make him happy. Why do I live? What's the good of me? What use am I? I'm good for nothing but to bear children; and, in point of fact, I don't want any children! I shouldn't know how to bring them up! Besides, what's the good of bringing children into the world? Wouldn't it be better I had never been born? What's the good of life?"

Surely her soul had become involved in the shadow darkening round her! Everything in her seemed dead. And then suddenly she thought of the luminous evenings on the shores of her great river at home; and saw again the wide horizons, the sky all violet and geranium colour, the infinite depths of the waters, the woods, the plain. She passed along the banks, the subdued splendour of all things reflected in her eyes, the water of rosy lilac, the heavens which flamed behind the wood, the warm grass which clothed the banks. Young willow-trees stretched out to drink the shining water, and they drank, they drank, consumed by an inextinguishable thirst. She passed on, and as the little willows drank, so she also drank in dreams from the burning river. What limitless horizons! What deeps of water! What tender distant voices carried by the waves, dying on the night! Was it a call out of a far world? Was it the crying of birds from the wood? Was it the woodpecker tapping on the poplar-tree?

Alas, no! it was her own foot beating the devil's tattoo; it was the clock ticking away indifferently in the penumbra of the little room; it was the caged canary moaning for nostalgia in the window opposite, above the lurid abyss of the courtyard.

Regina jumped to her feet; she was rebellious and desperate, suffocated by a sense of rage.

"I'll tell him the moment he comes in," she thought; "I'll cry, 'Why did you take me from there? Why have you brought me to this place? What can I do here? I must go away. I require air. I require light. You can't give me light, you can't give me air, and you never told me! How was I to know the world was like this? Away with all these gimcracks, all this lumber! I don't want it. I only want air! air! air! I am suffocating! I hate you all! I curse the city and the men who built it, and the fate which robs us even of the sight of heaven!'"

She went to her room, and automatically looked in the glass. By the last glimmer of day she saw her beautiful shining hair, her shining teeth, her shining nails, her fine skin which (softened by a light stratum of "Crema Venus") had almost the transparent delicacy of Miss Harris's. Her resentment grew. She went to her dressing-table, snatched up the bottle of "Crema" and dashed it against the wall. The bottle bounded off on the bed without breaking. She picked it up and replaced it on the table.

"No! no! no!" she sobbed, throwing herself on the pillow, "I will not bear it! I'll say to him, 'Do you see what I'm becoming? Do you see what you're making me? To-day a soiling of the face, to-morrow soiling of the soul! I will go away—I will go away—away! I will go back home. You are nothing to me!' Yes, I will tell him the moment he comes in!"

When he came in he found her seated quietly at the table, busy with the list of purchases for the following day. It was late, the lamps were lit, the table was laid, the servant was preparing supper. The whole of the little dwelling was pervaded by the contemptible yet merry hissing of the frying-pan and the smell of fried artichokes. From the window, open towards the garden, penetrated the contrasting fragrance of laurels and of grass.

Antonio came over to the table, bent down, and looked at the paper on which Regina was writing.

"I was here at six, and couldn't find you," he said.

"I was out."

"Listen. The Princess sent a note to the office asking me to go to her at half-past six; so I went."

"What did she want?"

"Well—she's beginning to be a nuisance, you know—she wants me to keep an eye on the man who speculates for her on the Stock Exchange."

Regina looked up and saw that Antonio's face was pale and damp.

"On the Stock Exchange? What does that mean?"

"What it means? I'll explain some time. But—well, really, that woman is becoming a plague!"

"But if she pays you?" said Regina; "and are you good at speculating?"

"I only wish I had the opportunity!" he exclaimed, tossing his hat to the sofa; "I wish I had a little of Madame's superfluous money! But this isn't a case of speculating. I'm to study the state of the money-market and audit the operations carried out by Cavaliere R—— on the Princess's account; take note of the details of daily transactions; get information from the brokers; in short, exercise rigorous control over all the fellow does."

"But," insisted Regina, "she'll pay you well, won't she?"

"Beg pardon?" he said, mimicking the Princess.

"How much will she pay you?" shouted Regina.

"A hundred lire or so. She's a skinflint, you know."

"Supper's on the table, Signora," announced the servant with her accustomed elegant decorum.

During the meal Antonio expounded the operations on 'Change, and other financial matters, talking with a certain enthusiasm. She appeared interested in what he told her; yet while she listened her eyes shone with the vague light of a thought very far away from what Antonio was saying. That thought was straying in a dark and empty distance; like a blind man feeling his way in a strange place, it sought and sought something to be a point of rest, a support, or at least a sign.

Suddenly, however, Regina's eyes sparkled and returned to the world about her.

"Why shouldn't you be Madame's confidential agent?" she said; "her secretary? I remember what I dreamed the first night I saw her at Arduina's—that she was dead and had left us her money!"

"It would be easy enough," said Antonio.

"To get the money?"

"No—the administration of her affairs. True, one would have to flatter and cringe, and take people in, especially as she employs two or three others in addition to the Cavaliere. One would have to intrigue against them all. I don't care for that sort of business."

"Nor I," said Regina, stiffening.

She rose and moved to the window which overlooked the garden. Antonio followed her. The night was warm and voluptuous. The scent of laurel rose ever sweeter and stronger; patches of yellow light were spread over the little garden paths like a carpet. Regina looked down, then raised her eyes towards the darkened blue of the heavens and sighed, stifling the sigh in a yawn.

"After all," said Antonio, pursuing his own line of thought, "are we not happy? What do we lack?"

"Nothing and everything!"

"What is lacking to us, I say?" repeated Antonio, questioning himself rather than his wife; "what do you mean by your 'everything'?"

"Do you see the Bear?" she asked, looking up, and pretending not to have heard this question. He looked also.

"No, I don't——"

"Then we do lack something! We can't see the stars."

"What do you want with the stars? Leave them where they are, for they're quite useless! If there were anything you really wanted you wouldn't be crying for the stars."

"Then you think I am lacking in——?" She touched her forehead.

"So it seems!"

"Perhaps the deficiency is in you," she said quickly.

"Now you're insulting me, and I'll take you and pitch you out of the window!" he jested, seizing her waist. "If my wits are deficient, it's because you're making me lose them with your folly!"