“It is an inspiration,” he said excitedly more than once. “The rose of the world that can only be reached by love—or hate—holding the clue.”
He had promised an American who had bought a picture of his the year before that he would do some work for him in Venice in the spring. “Very rash of me,” he said fractiously. “The ‘Jeune Fille’ would have been quite enough for me to show, and it is dreadful to have to leave it unfinished now.” And when Gontrand tried to persuade him to let him have Olive during his absence he was, as the girl phrased it, quite cross. “I have seen enough of that. Last year in the Salon St Elizabeth of Hungary, and Clytemnestra, and Malesherbe’s vivandière were one and the same woman. Besides, oreads are nearly related to Bacchantes, Gontrand, and I am not going to allow my little sewing-girl to be mixed up with people of that sort.”
He made Olive promise not to sit for any of the other men at the Villa Medici.
“I shall work at Varini’s in the evenings,” she said. “And one of the men there wants me to come to his studio in the Via Margutta three mornings a week. He is a Baron von something.”
The Frenchman’s face lightened. “Oh, that German! I know him. I saw a landscape of his once. It looked as if several tubes of paint had got together and burst. What else will you do?”
“Rome, if you will lend me your Bædeker,” she answered. “I shall begin with A and work my way through Beatrice Cenci and the Borgo Nuovo to the Corsini Gallery and the Corso. Some of the letters may be rather dull. I am so glad Apollo comes now.”
He laughed. “M for Michelin. You will be sure to admire me when my turn comes.”
Olive was living alone now in a tall old house in Ripetta. The two kind women who had been her friends had left Rome and gone to stay with their brother at Como. It was evidently the best thing they could do, and the girl had assured them that she was quite well able to look after herself, but they had been only half convinced by her reasoning. She was English and she had done it before. “That is nothing,” Ser Giulia said. “You may catch a ball once, and the second time it may slip through your fingers. And sometimes Life is like the importunate widow and goes on asking until one gives what one should not.” She helped her to find a room, and eked out the furniture from her own little store. “Another saucepan, and a kettle, and a blanket. And if lessons fail you must come to us, figliuola mia. My brother’s house is large.”
The girl had answered her with a kiss, but though she loved them she was not altogether sorry to see them go. She could never tell them how she had earned the lire that paid the baker’s bill. The truth would hurt them, and she would not give them a moment’s pain if she could avoid it, but she was not good at lying. Even the very little white ones stuck in her throat, and she was relieved to be no longer under the necessity of uttering them.
The room she had taken was on the sixth floor, and from the one narrow window she could look across the yellow swirl of Tiber towards Monte Mario. She had set up her household gods. The plaster bust of Dante, and her books, on the rickety wooden table by her bedside, and, such as it was, this place was home.