“I am a model. My face is ugly, as you see,” she said in her simple, straightforward way; “but otherwise I am beautiful, and I can always get work with sculptors. The signorino is an American and he has an unpronounceable name. He is doing me as Eve, crouched on the ground and hiding my head in my arms. After the Fall, you know. Have you been to the Andreoni gallery? There is a statuette of me there called ‘Morning.’ This is the pose.”
She clasped her hands together behind her head, raising her chin a little. Olive observed the smooth long throat, the exquisite lines of the shoulders and breast and hips. Pasquina slipped off her mother’s knees.
“Are you well paid?”
“It depends on the artist. Some are so poor that they cannot give, and others will not. The schools allow fifteen soldi an hour, but the signorino is paying me twenty-five soldi. In the evenings I sing and dance at a caffè near the station.”
Olive hesitated. “Do—do artists ever want models dressed?”
Rosina looked at her quickly. “Oh, yes, when they are as pretty as you are. But you are well educated—one sees that—it is not fit work for such as you.”
“Never mind that,” Olive said eagerly. “How does one begin being a model? I will try that. Will you help me?”
Rosina beamed at her. “Sicuro! We will go to Varini’s school in the Corso if you like. The woman in the newspaper kiosk in the Piazza di Spagna knows me, and I can leave Pasquina with her. An’iamo!”
The two girls went together down the wide, shallow steps of the Trinità dei Monti with the child between them.
Poor little Pasquina was the outward and visible sign of her mother’s inward and hopelessly material gracelessness; she symbolised the great gulf fixed between smirched Roman Rosina and Jean’s English rose in their different understanding of their own hearts’ uses. Olive believed love to be the way to heaven; Rosina knew it, or thought she knew it, as a means of livelihood.