She did in fact adapt herself—without knowing why. In herself and in her surroundings, in the quiet life which she and Antonio had resumed, she was sometimes conscious of an emptiness like that in the new Apartment, but she no longer rebelled.
After dinner they would go out arm in arm in the good bourgeois fashion, stifling the gentle tedium of their existence at the Café Aragno or in Piazza Colonna, oftener in the streets and avenues round Piazza della Stazione. The little tables in front of the Café Gambrinus or Café Morteo were always surrounded by people who at any rate seemed very lively. Crowds tramped the broad streets, bright with electricity and moonlight. Beyond the great white square, where the twin lights of the trams shone like drops of water, the station carriages looked like files of monstrous sleeping insects.
After the long silences and solemn solitudes of the Po, back now in the crowd, in the cold, sharp splendour of the electric lights hidden like little moons among the black ilices, Regina felt herself in a dream. The cafés were overflown with light. Livid reflections came from some empty table. Vestiges of lunar rays made their way through the green shadows, the strange semi-darkness of the trees. The crowd rolled past and looked into the café, merry with a second crowd reflected and multiplied by mirrors. Now and then, in the smoke-wreathed background of the Morteo, hovered the moving and screaming figure of a singer, whose coarse notes were mixed with the melancholy scraping of violins and the buzz of the people. A hundred faces, derisive but brutally pleased, looked at the swaying, strident figure. Regina found a curious interest in watching the crowd, the faces, the light dresses of the women, the physiognomy of the men who ogled the singer, the pitiable arms of this pitiable creature.
One evening a little girl with thick hair falling in a red plait over thin shoulders, with a green hat and a short green dress, which left half-bare her meagre legs and big feet cased in yellow shoes, reminded her of a water bird. Then suddenly, under those trees blackened and burnt up by the heat of a thousand burning breaths, she thought of her great river, of the poplars rising at this hour like candles lighted by the moon, of the white line of the river-banks cleaving the immense circle of the plain; and she marvelled that she no longer felt the nostalgia which she had known of old.
Antonio proposed to sit down at the café, but Regina preferred moving round with the crowd, going as far as Via Volturno, where the voices of the melon-sellers crossed, followed, answered each other jealously, like the crowing of cocks.
"Favorischino, Signori! Favorischino!"
On the black, damp tables, cut melons showed rosy in the trembling lamp-light, and diffused a fresh and agreeable odour like great red flowers. Children, workmen, a pair of students, a woman or two, bent over the pink flesh of the juicy slices.
"Favorischino, Signori! Behold what beauties! Real blood! Will you buy one, lady?"
There was a stall at the corner of the street against the wall, and the vendor looked condescendingly at the people clustered round his banks of melons; but if any one noticed his money-box, he turned anxiously and put on an air of preternatural solemnity.