BOOK II
CHAPTER I
"Astrid," said Ragna, "do make haste! It will be luncheon time before we get out, and you can perfectly well finish your letter this evening."
Astrid looked up from her writing-board, nibbling her pen-holder reflectively. She was sitting near one window of the room, and by the other stood Ragna, pulling on her gloves impatiently. They had been in Rome a few weeks, and the first fervour of sight-seeing over, had fallen into a go-as-you-please sort of existence. Fru Bjork left the girls largely to their own devices; the long flight of stairs to be climbed after every outing so tired her legs and shortened her breath, that she declined to face them more than once a day, and she had conscientious scruples against eating in a restaurant, when her meals must be paid for, in any case, at the pension. Estelle Hagerup preferred to wander about alone; she would start out valiantly in the morning, her hat tied firmly on her sleek head, her skirt looped up in festoons by a series of flaps and buttons, displaying her sturdy broad-toed boots. The very glasses perched on her prominent nose gave an earnest inquiring expression to her face. Night-fall would see her home again, tired, dusty, radiant and quite unable to give a connected account of her peregrinations. She would blissfully say:
"I am drinking in the atmosphere, I am saturating myself with the essence of Rome!" and the word "Rome" as she said it with an awed expression and bated breath suggested a hoary cavern of antiquity, haunted by the ghosts of buried Cæsars. Her short-sighted eyes would grow round and she would clasp her large bony hands ecstatically. Good-natured Fru Bjork smiled at her enthusiasm and if the girls made fun of her at times, they did it pleasantly.
Astrid was inclined to be lazy; she enjoyed the sun and the warmth, and the picturesque figures on the Spanish Stairs, but museums and picture galleries bored her, and the churches, she declared, gave her the creeps. So it fell out that Ragna who wished to do her sight-seeing after a methodical plan, generally found herself alone. Armed with a guide book she began at the beginning, as it were, visiting first the most ancient ruins and relics, in their order, working on down to modern times. It disconcerted her to find ancient and modern mingled—as they so often were,—and at the Pantheon she resolutely shut her eyes to the monuments of the House of Savoy, until such time as she should have reached their place in history. It will be seen that her method involved no little difficulty and much returning over the same ground. It seemed pure lunacy to Astrid, who objected to being dragged over and over again to the same place to observe some addition or later adaptation which she had been forbidden to inspect on her first visit.
"It would be so easy to see it all at once," she plaintively protested, but Ragna was adamant.
Astrid therefore pleaded her delicate health and the overfatigue caused by such strenuous sight-seeing as an excuse to remain at home, where she composed lengthy epistles to her fiancé with whom she was comfortably, if not passionately, in love.