"It's appalling the number of countesses in Rome," said Regina to her husband.
She was partly amused, partly wearied; she was not offended when the grand ladies failed to return her visits; and she no longer wondered at the shocking things said in almost all the drawing-rooms about the people most distinguished in the literary, the political, and even in the private world.
"Anything is possible," said Marianna, "and what is most possible of all is that the things they say are calumnies."
In the early spring Regina had a recrudescence of nostalgia and discontent. The little Apartment began to be hot. She stood for hours at the window with the nervous unquiet of a bird not yet used to its cage. From the "Pussies' Garden" rose a smell of damp grass which induced in her spasms of homesickness. Sometimes she looked down through her eye-glass, and saw a certain short and plump, pale and bald young man, strolling round and round the little vase into which the fountain wept tears of tedium. Life was tedious also for that young man. Regina remembered seeing him on the evening of San Stefano in a box at the Costanzi, his face bloated and yellow as an unripe apricot; and she had included him in her incendiary hatred. Now he, too, was bored. Was he bored because he had come down into the garden, or had he come down into the garden because he was bored? Sometimes he stood and teased the goldfish; then he yawned and battered the flowers with his stick, the wistaria on the walls, the monthly roses, the innocent daisies.
"He must beat something," thought Regina, and remembered that she herself was itching to torment any one or anything. On rainy days—frequent and tedious—she became depressed, even to hypochondria. Only one thought comforted her—that of the return to her home. She counted the days and the hours. Strange, childish recollections, distant fancies, passed through her mind like clouds across a sad sky. Details of her past life waked in her melting tenderness; she remembered vividly even the humblest persons of the place, the most secret nooks in the house or in the wood; with strange insistence she thought of certain little things which never before had greatly struck her. For instance, there was an old millstone, belonging to a ruined mill, which lay in the grass by the river-side. The remembrance of that old grey millstone, resting after its labour beside the very stream with which it had so long wrestled, moved Regina almost to tears. Often she tried to analyse her nostalgia, asking herself why she thought of the millstone, of the old blind chimney sweep, of the portiner (ferryman), who had enormous hairy hands and was getting on for a hundred; of the clean-limbed children by the green ditch, intent on making straw ropes; of the little snails crawling among the leaves of the plane-trees.
"I am an idiot!" she thought; yet with the thought came a sudden rush of joy at the idea of soon again seeing the millstone, the ferryman, the children, the green ditches, and the little snails.
And outside it rained and rained. Rome was drowned in mire and gloom. Regina raged like a furious child, wishing that upon Rome a rain of mud might fall for evermore, forcing all the inhabitants to emigrate and go away. Then, then she would return to her birth-place, to the wide horizons, the pure flowing river of her home; she would be born anew, she would be Regina once more, a bird alive and free!
Antonio went out and came in, and always found her wrapped in her homesick stupor, indifferent to everything about her.
"Let's take a walk, Regina!"
"Oh, no!"