The woman took an envelope from Gabrie's table and held it to the wall.
"Gone to post a letter, is that it? Well, I'll wait a few minutes, as I am tired. And how's Signor Ennio?"
Again the woman smiled, made the gesture of violin-playing, then opened her arms very wide, perhaps to intimate that he had gone a long way, and that his instrument was speaking tenderly and humbly to some German bride and bridegroom in that hour of sun, in the poetry of some suburban inn, lively with chickens and pink with peach-blossom.
Regina sat down, and the little woman went away.
For some minutes profound silence reigned in the clean little Apartment, full of peace and the odour of baked meats. Gabrie's tiny room, with its pink-flowered yellow paper, its narrow white bed, its little table littered with books and copy-books, its window open on a sky of pearl-strewn azure, gave Regina the idea of a nest on the top of a poplar-tree. Yes! life was lovely even for the poor! Everything was relative. This strolling fiddler, who at night brought two, three, sometimes even five lire home to his little hard-working, dumb wife, and found his little home clean, a good piece of abbacchio (kid) in the oven, and a soft bed waiting for him, was happier than many a millionaire. And Gabrie, with her pluck and her dreams, who saw her life before her long but luminous, like that depth of sky behind her window—who could say how happy she must be! "Happiness is not in our surroundings, but in ourselves," thought Regina. "I declare I once thought myself wretched because I lived on a fifth floor in a house which was in quite a good quarter. Now I believe I could be happy even here—in this house of poor people, in the outskirts of the kingdom of the most miserable!"
Still Gabrie did not come in. So much the better, if it meant she was cured. Regina looked at her tiny clock; it was half-past ten. She could wait a little longer. She got up and walked to the window. On the right, on the left, overhead, that dazzling sky; down below the railway, the tall houses tanned by the sun; bits of green, the vague breathing of life and of spring, the immense palpitation of a distant steam engine. All, all was beautiful.
Still no Gabrie. Regina left the window and approached the table to set down the violets which she still held in her hand. Her silk petticoat made a great rustling in the silence of the tiny room.
Yes; everything was beautiful; not least that little table covered with foolscap and note-books which represented the dream, the essence, the finger-marks of a soul clear and deep as a mirror. Regina took up an open note-book.
She remembered the time when she, too, had thought of becoming an authoress. She had never succeeded in writing the first line of her first chapter. How far would Gabrie get? Further, it was to be hoped, than Arduina! Regina's thoughts wandered to her husband's relations. They had disappeared, or at least faded from her life, like personages in the opening chapters of a novel who find no opportunity of coming in again. Regina often sent nurse and baby to visit the grand-mother, and she listened to Antonio when he talked of his family. Herself, however, she hardly ever saw any of them, and though now she regarded them as neither more nor less agreeable than a thousand others, she could not resist a feeling of resentment whenever she found herself in their society.
But why should she think of them now when she was turning the leaves of Gabrie's note-book? She sought the sequence of ideas. This was it. Confusedly she was thinking that if Antonio, instead of taking her to his relations in that odious Apartment, choked up with lumber and horrible figures like an ugly and ill-painted picture, had brought her to a little, silent, sunny home as humble as even this of the ex-organist, she would not have suffered so acutely during her honeymoon.