the rank in the piazza hailed her with cries of "Rosi"; she
was greeted by beggars at the street corners, dustmen, _carabinieri_,
crossing-sweepers, and Olive was not wholly unembarrassed. Yet Rosina
escaped the vulgarity of some who might be called her betters as the
world goes by being simply natural. When she was amused she laughed
aloud, when she was tired she yawned as openly and flagrantly as any
duchess. In manners extremes meet, and the giggle and the sneer are
the disastrous half measures of the ill-bred, the social greasers.
Rosina had never been sly in her life; she was ever as simply without
shame as Eve before the Fall, and lawless because she knew no law. The
darkness of Northern cities is tainted and cold and cannot bring forth
such kindly things as the _rosine_--little roses--that spring up in
the warm, sweet Roman dust.

"Here is Varini's."

They passed through a covered passage into a little garden overgrown
with laurels and gnarled old pepper trees; there was a fountain with
gold fish, and green arums were springing up about a broken faun's
head set on a pedestal of _verd' antico_. Some men were standing
together in the path, a pretty dark-eyed peasant girl with them. They
all turned to stare, and the _cioccara_ put out her tongue as Olive
went by. Rosina instantly replied in kind.

"_Ohe! Fortunata! Benedetta ragazza!_ Resting as usual? Does Lorenz
still beat you?"

She described the antecedents and characteristics of Lorenz.

The slower-witted country girl had a more limited vocabulary. Her eyes
glared in the shadow of her white coif. "Ah," she gasped. "_Brutta
bestia!_" and she turned her back.

The men laughed, and Rosina laughed with them as she knocked on a
green painted door in the wall. It was opened by a burly, bearded
man, tweed-clad, and swathed in a stained painting apron.

"Oh, _Professore_, here is a friend of mine who wants work."

"Come in," he said shortly, and they followed him into a large untidy
studio. A Pompeian fruit-seller in a black frame, a study for a
Judgment of Paris on a draped easel, and on another easel the portrait
of an old lady just begun. There were stacks of canvases on the floor
and on all the chairs.

"Turn to the light," the artist said brusquely; and then, as Olive
obeyed him, "Don't be frightened. You are new, I see. You are so pink
and white that I thought you were painted. You are not Italian?"

"No."

"What, then?"

She was silent.

He sm