Heaven helps those who help themselves, she thought, as she borrowed a broom from her landlady to sweep the floor. The morning was fine and she opened the windows wide and let the sun and air in. At noon she went down into the Borgo and bought fried polenta for five soldi and a slice of chestnut cake at the cook shop, and filled her kettle with clear cold water from the fountain in the courtyard.
Later, as she waited for the water to boil over her little spirit lamp, she made a list of absolute necessaries. She had paid a month’s rent in advance, and fifty-three lire remained to her. Fifty-three lire out of which she must buy a straw mattress, a camp-stool, two blankets, some crockery and soap.
She went out presently to do her shopping and came back at dusk. She was young enough to rather enjoy the novelty of her proceedings, and she slept well that night on the floor, pillowless, and wrapped in her coarse brown coverings; and though the moon shone in upon her through the unshuttered windows for a while she did not dream or wake until the dawn.
Olive tried very hard to get work in the days that followed, and she went twice to the registry office in the Piazza Vittorio Emanuele.
“Ah, you were here before.” A stout woman came bustling out from the room behind the shop to speak to her the second time. “There is nothing for you, signorina mia. The ladies who come here will not take anyone without a character, and a written reference from Milan or Rome is no good. I told you so before. Last winter Contessa Foscoli had an English maid with a written character—not from us, I am glad to say—and she ran away with the chauffeur after a fortnight, and took a diamond ring and the Contessa’s pearls with her. If you cannot tell me who you were with last I shall not be able to help you.”
“The Marchesa Lorenzoni,” Olive said.
The woman drew in her breath with a hissing noise, then she smiled, not pleasantly. “Why did you not say so before? I have heard of you, of course. The little English girl! Well, I can’t help you, my dear. This is a registry office.”
Olive walked out of the shop at once, but she heard the woman calling to someone in the room at the back to come and look at her, and she felt her cheeks burning as she crossed the road. “The little English girl!” What were they saying about her?
One morning she went into one of the English tea-rooms. It was kept by two elderly maiden ladies, and one of them came forward to ask her what she wanted. The Pagoda was deserted at that hour, a barren wilderness of little bamboo tables and chairs, tea-less and cake-less. The walls were distempered green and sparsely decorated with Japanese paper fans, and Olive noticed them and the pattern of the carpet and remembered them afterwards as one remembers the frieze, the engravings, the stale periodicals in a dentist’s waiting-room.
“Do—do you want a waitress?”