Cecilia: A Story of Modern Rome

by F. Marion Crawford

Lamberti had once observed to Guido that she was an indulgent daughter; and Guido had smiled and reminded his friend of the younger Dumas, who once said that his father always seemed to him a favourite child that had been born to him before he came into the world. Cecilia was certainly fond of her mother, but it had never occurred to Guido that she could not live without her. He was in a state of mind, however, in which a man in love accepts everything as a matter of course, and he merely answered that in that case they would naturally live in Rome.

"We could just live here, for the present," she said. "There is the Palazzo Massimo. I am sure it is big enough. Should you dislike it?"

She was thinking that if she could keep her own room, and have Petersen with her, and her mother, the change would not be so great after all. Guido said nothing, and his expression was a blank.

"Why not?" Cecilia insisted, and all sorts of practical reasons suggested themselves at once. "It is a very comfortable house, though it is a little ghostly at night. There are dreadful stories about it, you know. But what does that matter? It is big, and in a good part of the city, and we have just furnished it; so of what use in the world is it to go and do the same thing over again, in the next street?"

"That is very sensible," Guido was obliged to admit.

"But you do not like the idea, I am sure," Cecilia said, in a tone of disappointment.

"I had not meant that we should live in the same house with your mother," Guido said, with a smile. "Of course, she is a very charming woman, and I like her very much, but I think that when people marry they had much better go and live by themselves."

"Nobody ever used to," objected Cecilia. "It is only of late years that they do it in Rome. Oh, I see!" she cried suddenly. "How dull of me! Yes. I understand. It is quite natural."

"What?" asked Guido with some curiosity.

"You would feel that you had simply come to live in our house, because you have no house of your own for us to live in. I ought to have thought of that."