Hers was the strange, boding loveliness of a pale orchid. She had no colour, but her curved lips were faintly pink, as were the palms of her soft, idle hands. “I shall be glad when she is married,” her aunt said often. “It is very well for Maria or Carmela to go through the streets alone, but Gemma is otherwise, and I cannot be always running after her. Then her temper ... Dio mio!”
“Perhaps it is the vinegar,” suggested Carolina rather spitefully.
“No. She wants a husband.”
When the dinner was over Signora Carosi went to her room to lie down, and her two elder nieces followed her example, but Carmela passed into the kitchen with Carolina.
“You will let me see the cousin,” she said, wheedling. “Gemma thinks she will be ugly, with great teeth and a red face like the Englishwomen in the Asino, but I do not believe it.”
“If the signorina is hoping for a miracle of plainness she will be unpleasantly surprised,” said the old woman, and her shrivelled face was as mischievous as a monkey’s as she drew the key of Olive’s room from her pocket. “I am going to take her some soup now, and you shall come with me.”
It is quite impossible to be retiring, or even modest, in the mid-Victorian sense, in flats. A bedroom cannot remain an inviolate sanctuary when it affords the only means of access to the bathroom or is a short cut to the kitchen. Olive had had some experience of suburban flats during holidays spent with school friends, and had suffered the familiarity that breeds weariness in such close quarters. As she woke now she was unpleasantly aware of strangers in the room.
“Only a lover or a nurse may look at a woman while she sleeps without offence,” she said drowsily. “It is an unpardonable liberty in all other classes of the population. Are you swains, or sisters of mercy?” She opened her eyes and met Carmela’s puzzled stare with laughter. “I was saying that when one is ill or in love one can endure many things,” she explained in halting Italian.
“Ah,” Carmela said uncomprehendingly, “I am never ill, grazia a Dio, but when Maria has an indigestion she is cross, and when Gemma is in love her temper is dreadful. Perhaps, being a foreigner, you are different. Are you tired?”
“Yes, I am, rather, but go on talking to me. I am not sleepy.”