Through the thin partition wall they heard the professor calling for his model. “I must go,” she said hurriedly, but as she passed out Olive caught at a fold of the enveloping blanket.
“Come here, I want you.” She flung her arms about the other girl’s neck and kissed her. “You are good! You are good!”
She went into the class room and climbed the throne as the men came clattering in to take their places. The professor posed her.
“So you have come back to us. Do not let them spoil you at the Villa Medici—your head a little higher—so.”
The first drawing in of the figure is not a thing to be taken lightly, and the silence was seldom broken at Varini’s on Monday evenings. The two boys, however, found it hard to repress the natural loquacity of their extreme youth.
“Al lavoro, Mario! What are you whispering about? Cesare, zitto!” Bembi stared at them. “Their chins are disappearing,” he said. “See their collars. Every day an inch higher. Dio mio! Is that the way to please women? I wear a flannel shirt and my neck is as bare as a plucked chicken, and yet I—” he stopped short.
Mario laughed. “Women are strange,” he admitted.
“Mad!” cried Cesare, and then as Bembi still smirked ineffably he appealed to Olive. “Do you admire fowls wrapped in flannel or in arrosto?”
When she came out she found Rosina waiting for her in the courtyard, a grey shadow with smooth fair hair shining in the moonlight. “The professor let me go at eight so I dressed and came out here,” she explained. “The dressing-room is full of dust and spider’s webs. I told the porter the other day that he ought to sweep it, but he only laughed at me and said Domeniddio made spiders long before he took a rib out of Adam’s side to whip a naughty world.”
“Who is the man?” she asked presently as they walked along together. “Do I know him?”