Hilaire went out of the room.
BOOK III.—ROME
CHAPTER I
Olive was alone in the compartment of the train that bore her away from Florence and from Jean. She had a book; it lay open on her lap, and she had tried to read, but the lines all ran together and the effort to concentrate her thoughts made her head ache. She was very unhappy. It seemed to her that now indeed life was emptied of all sweets and the taste of it was as dust and ashes in her mouth. She was leaving youth and joy behind; or rather, she had killed them and left a man to bury them. At Orvieto she nearly broke down. It would be so easy to get out and cross over to the other platform and there await the next train back to Florence. She had her hand upon the handle of the door when a boy with little flasks of wine in a basket came up and asked her to buy, and as she answered him she heard the cry of “Partenza!” It was too late; the moment had passed, and after a while she knew that she was glad she had not yielded. She was doing the right thing. What was the old French motto? “Fais ce que doit, advienne que pourra.” The brave words comforted her a little. She was very tired, and presently she slept.
She was awakened by the discordant yells of the Roman facchini on the station platform. One of them carried her box to the office of the Dogana, but a large party of Americans had come by the same train and the officials were too busily engaged in turning over the contents of their innumerable Saratogas to do more than scrabble in chalk on the side of her shabby leather trunk and shake their heads at the proffered key, and soon she was in a vettura clattering down the wide new Via Nazionale.
Signora de Sanctis lived with her sister in one of the old streets in the lower part of the city near the Pantheon—the Via Arco della Ciambella. The houses there are built on the foundations of the Baths of Agrippa, and a brick arch, part of the great Tepidarium, remains to give the street its name. The poor fragment has been Christianised; a wayside altar sanctifies it, and a little painted shrine to the Madonna adorns the base. The buildings on that side are small and mean and overshadowed by the great yellow palace of the Spinola opposite. Olive’s friends lived over a wine shop, but the entrance was some way down the street.
“Fortunately, my dear,” as they remarked, “though really the place is very quiet. People go outside the gates to get drunk.”