The model was very evidently not only familiar with the studios. The cabmen on the rank in the piazza hailed her with cries of “Rosi”; she was greeted by beggars at the street corners, dustmen, carabinieri, crossing-sweepers, and Olive was not wholly unembarrassed. Yet Rosina escaped the vulgarity of some who might be called her betters as the world goes by being simply natural. When she was amused she laughed aloud, when she was tired she yawned as openly and flagrantly as any duchess. In manners extremes meet, and the giggle and the sneer are the disastrous half measures of the ill-bred, the social greasers. Rosina had never been sly in her life; she was ever as simply without shame as Eve before the Fall, and lawless because she knew no law. The darkness of Northern cities is tainted and cold and cannot bring forth such kindly things as the rosine—little roses—that spring up in the warm, sweet Roman dust.
“Here is Varini’s.”
They passed through a covered passage into a little garden overgrown with laurels and gnarled old pepper trees; there was a fountain with gold fish, and green arums were springing up about a broken faun’s head set on a pedestal of verd’ antico. Some men were standing together in the path, a pretty dark-eyed peasant girl with them. They all turned to stare, and the cioccara put out her tongue as Olive went by. Rosina instantly replied in kind.
“Ohè! Fortunata! Benedetta ragazza! Resting as usual? Does Lorenz still beat you?”
She described the antecedents and characteristics of Lorenz.
The slower-witted country girl had a more limited vocabulary. Her eyes glared in the shadow of her white coif. “Ah,” she gasped. “Brutta bestia!” and she turned her back.
The men laughed, and Rosina laughed with them as she knocked on a green painted door in the wall. It was opened by a burly, bearded man, tweed-clad, and swathed in a stained painting apron.
“Oh, Professore, here is a friend of mine who wants work.”
“Come in,” he said shortly, and they followed him into a large untidy studio. A Pompeian fruit-seller in a black frame, a study for a Judgment of Paris on a draped easel, and on another easel the portrait of an old lady just begun. There were stacks of canvases on the floor and on all the chairs.
“Turn to the light,” the artist said brusquely; and then, as Olive obeyed him, “Don’t be frightened. You are new, I see. You are so pink and white that I thought you were painted. You are not Italian?”