sed into
the kitchen with Carolina.

"You will let me see the cousin," she said, wheedling. "Gemma thinks
she will be ugly, with great teeth and a red face like the
Englishwomen in the Asino, but I do not believe it."

"If the signorina is hoping for a miracle of plainness she will be
unpleasantly surprised," said the old woman, and her shrivelled face
was as mischievous as a monkey's as she drew the key of Olive's room
from her pocket. "I am going to take her some soup now, and you shall
come with me."

It is quite impossible to be retiring, or even modest, in the
mid-Victorian sense, in flats. A bedroom cannot remain an inviolate
sanctuary when it affords the only means of access to the bathroom or
is a short cut to the kitchen. Olive had had some experience of
suburban flats during holidays spent with school friends, and had
suffered the familiarity that breeds weariness in such close quarters.
As she woke now she was unpleasantly aware of strangers in the room.

"Only a lover or a nurse may look at a woman while she sleeps without
offence," she said drowsily. "It is an unpardonable liberty in all
other classes of the population. Are you swains, or sisters of mercy?"
She opened her eyes and met Carmela's puzzled stare with laughter. "I
was saying that when one is ill or in love one can endure many
things," she explained in halting Italian.

"Ah," Carmela said uncomprehendingly, "I am never ill, _grazia a Dio_,
but when Maria has an indigestion she is cross, and when Gemma is in
love her temper is dreadful. Perhaps, being a foreigner, you are
different. Are you tired?"

"Yes, I am, rather, but go on talking to me. I am not sleepy."

Carmela, nothing loth, drew a chair to the bedside. "You need not get
up yet," she said comfortably. "We always lie down after dinner until
five, and later we go for a walk. You will see the Via Cavour full of
people in the evening, officers and students, and mothers with
daughters to be married, all walking up and down and looking at each
other. Orazio Lucis first saw Gemma like that, and he followed us
home, and then found out who we were and asked questions about us.
Every day we saw him in the Piazza, smoking cigarettes, and waiting
for us to go out that he might follow us, and Gemma would give him one
look, and then cast down her eyes ... so!" Carmela caricatured her
sister's affectation of unconsciousness very successfully, and looked
to Olive and Carolina for applause.

T