“Is it a lasting peace or merely an armistice?” he demanded, sweeping the papers from the table. “You are afraid to look at me for fear you will surrender.”
“It is an armistice,” she said sedately. “It is beneath your dignity as a composer to take pupils who have not real genius. I still hold to that. And I shall need celery and romaine and tomatoes and grapefruit and almonds for my salad, so you may go out and find them.”
She tied a strip of drapery around her for an apron, and started preparations for lunch. Ames leaned from a back window and hailed a small and willing neighbor to go to the market, after the needs of the queen, as he said.
They did not speak to each other for some time. Ames watched her as the sunlight poured down on her bowed head. He held a melon in one hand, uplifted absently, a length of scarlet and black art burlap around his waist.
“You look exactly like one of the melon-sellers on the quay at Naples,” she told him, with a little smile. “When the boat stops there, they crowd around begging you to buy from them. Lift up your arm and call out.”
“I will do no such thing,” responded Ames buoyantly. “I decline to pose for your majesty. Will you deign to name your castle habitat, that I may call on your most royal parents and interest them in my humble self?”
She was serious in an instant.
“I have no people, signor. If you could go with me to the Villa Tittani, you would find a very little village high up on the rocks above the Campagna. You know where I mean? See?”
She dipped her finger-tips in the dregs of chianti remaining in the bowl beside her where she had used it in the salad dressing, and traced a map for him on the bare table-top.
“Here is the winding road from the shore, and here at the very top there is a villa with rose-tinted stone walls all about it, very high walls overgrown with flowers and vines. That is where the nobility live.” Her eyes were sparkling with mischief. “Often when I was little I have seen the Contessa walking on the terraces. She was so stately and handsome, and her daughter Bianca was like a real princess should be, a princess of dreams and fairy-tales, tall and slender and with eyes like stars. Then, if you walk on, down through the ilex avenue, you will come to a very quiet spot where the old tombs face the sea, and there are my people, all of them.”