Both the women seemed glad to see her. Her room was ready and a meal had been prepared and the cloth laid at one end of the work-table. The younger sister was a dressmaker too, and the floor was strewn with scraps of lining and silk. A white dress lay on the sofa, carefully folded and covered with a sheet of tissue paper.
“You look tired, Olive. Were you not happy in Florence?”
The girl admitted that the Lorenzoni had not been very kind to her. She had left them and had been living on her savings. It had been hard to find other employment. “I want to work,” she said. “You will let me help you, and I hope to get lessons.”
She asked to be allowed to wash the plates and dishes and put them away in the tiny kitchen. She was in a mood to bear anything better than the idleness that left room for her own sad thoughts, and she wished that they would let her do some sewing. “I am not good at needlework, but I can hem and put on buttons,” she pleaded.
Signora Giulia smiled at her. She was small, and she had a pale, dragged look and many lines about her weak eyes. “No, thank you, my dear. I have a girl apprentice who comes during the day, and I do the cutting out and designing and the embroidery myself. You must not tire yourself in the kitchen either. We have an old woman in to do mezzo servizio.”
It was nine o’clock, and the narrow streets were echoing now to the hoarse cries of the newsvendors: “Tribuna!” “Tribuna!”
“I will go and unpack then, and to-morrow I shall find some registry offices and try to get English lessons.”
“Yes, go, nina, and sleep well. You look tired. You must get stronger while you are with us.”
For a long time she could not sleep. In the summer she had played with the thought of love, and then she had been able to close her eyes and feel Jean Avenel close beside her, leaning towards her, saying that she must not be afraid, that he would not hurt her. It had been a sort of game, a childish game of make-believe that seemed to hurt no one, not even herself. But now she was hurt indeed; the remembrance of his kisses ached upon her lips.
When Tor di Rocca had asked her to go away with him she had felt that it might be worth while, that it would be pleasant to be cared for and loved, to eat and drink and die on the morrow, but the man himself had been nothing to her. A means to an end.