ndertake the new business.

In fact he ran away again. He gave a last look at the town and its
white-fanged mountains, and descended through the garden, round the way
of the kitchen garden and garage and stables and pecking chickens, back
to the house again. In the hall still no one. He went upstairs to the
long lounge. There sat the rubicund, bald, boy-like Colonel reading the
_Graphic_. Aaron sat down opposite him, and made a feeble attempt at
conversation. But the Colonel wasn't having any. It was evident he
didn't care for the fellow--Mr. Aaron, that is. Aaron therefore dried
up, and began to sit him out, with the aid of _The Queen_. Came a
servant, however, and said that the Signor Colonello was called up from
the hospital, on the telephone. The Colonel once departed, Aaron fled
again, this time out of the front doors, and down the steep little park
to the gates.

Huge dogs and little dogs came bounding forward. Out of the lodge came
the woman with the keys, smiling very pleasantly this morning. So, he
was in the street. The wide road led him inevitably to the big bridge,
with the violent, physical stone statue-groups. Men and women were
moving about, and he noticed for the first time the littleness and
the momentaneousness of the Italians in the street. Perhaps it was the
wideness of the bridge and the subsequent big, open boulevard. But there
it was: the people seemed little, upright brisk figures moving in a
certain isolation, like tiny figures on a big stage. And he felt himself
moving in the space between. All the northern cosiness gone. He was set
down with a space round him.

Little trams flitted down the boulevard in the bright, sweet light. The
barbers' shops were all busy, half the Novarese at that moment ambushed
in lather, full in the public gaze. A shave is nothing if not a public
act, in the south. At the little outdoor tables of the cafes a very few
drinkers sat before empty coffee-cups. Most of the shops were shut. It
was too soon after the war for life to be flowing very fast. The feeling
of emptiness, of neglect, of lack of supplies was evident everywhere.

Aaron strolled on, surprised himself at his gallant feeling of liberty:
a feeling of bravado and almost swaggering carelessness which is Italy's
best gift to an Englishman. He had crossed the dividing line, and
the values of life, though ostensibly and verbally the same, were
dynamically different. Alas, however, the verbal and the ostensibl