"This is our house," he said, getting out and immediately making another
attempt to light his cigar.

"May I offer you a cigarette?" asked Orsino, holding out his case.

Contini touched his hat, bowed a little awkwardly and took one of the
cigarettes, which he immediately transferred to his coat pocket.

"If you will allow me I will smoke it by and by," he said. "I have not
finished my cigar."

Orsino stood on the slippery ground beside the stones and contemplated
his purchase. All at once his heart sank and he felt a profound disgust
for everything within the range of his vision. He was suddenly aware of
his own total and hopeless ignorance of everything connected with
building, theoretical or practical. The sight of the stiff, angular
scaffoldings, draped with torn straw mattings that flapped fantastically
in the south-east wind, the apparent absence of anything like a real
house behind them, the blades of grass sprouting abundantly about the
foot of each pole and covering the heaps of brown pozzolana earth
prepared for making mortar, even the detail of a broken wooden hod
before the boarded entrance--all these things contributed at once to
increase his dismay and to fill him with a bitter sense of inevitable
failure. He found nothing to say, as he stood with his hands in his
pockets staring at the general desolation, but he understood for the
first time why women cry for disappointment. And moreover, this
desolation was his own peculiar property, by deed of purchase, and he
could not get rid of it.

Meanwhile Andrea Contini stood beside him, examining the scaffoldings
with his bright brown eyes, in no way disconcerted by the prospect.

"Shall we go in?" he asked at last.

"Do unfinished houses always look like this?" inquired Orsino, in a
hopeless tone, without noticing his companion's proposition.

"Not always," answered Contini cheerfully. "It depends upon the amount
of work that has been done, and upon other things. Sometimes the
foundations sink and the buildings collapse."

"Are you sure nothing of the kind has happened here?" asked Orsino with
increasing anxiety.

"I have been several times to look at it since the baker died and I have
not noticed any cracks yet," answered the architect, whose coolness
seemed almost exasperating.

"I suppose you understand these things, Signor Contini?"

Contini laughed, and felt in his pockets for a crumpled paper box of
wax-lights.

"It is my profession," he