“Pennies! Money! You can’t earn money in Naples. Ah, Naples is beautiful, but she is poor. You live in the sun, and you earn fourteen, fifteen pence a day—”
“Not enough,” she said.
He put his head on one side and tilted his brows, as if to say “What are you to do?” And the smile on his mouth was sad, fine, and charming. There was an indefinable air of sadness or wistfulness about him, something so robust and fragile at the same time, that she was drawn in a strange way.
“But you’ll go back?” she said.
“Where?”
“To Italy. To Naples.”
“Yes, I shall go back to Italy,” he said, as if unwilling to commit himself. “But perhaps I shan’t go back to Naples.”
“Never?”
“Ah, never! I don’t say never. I shall go to Naples, to see my mother’s sister. But I shan’t go to live—”
“Have you a mother and father?”