Nan kissed her mother and helped with the luggage and got a cab. Nan was good at railway stations and such places. Mrs. Hilary was not.
They drove out into the hideous new streets. Mrs. Hilary shivered.
"Oh, how ugly!"
"Rome is ugly, this part."
"It's worse since '99."
But she did not really remember clearly how it had looked in '99. The old desire to pose, to show that she knew something, took her. Yet she felt that Nan, who knew that she knew next to nothing, would not be deceived.
"Oh ... the Forum!"
"The Forum of Trajan," Nan said. "We don't pass the Roman Forum on the way to our street."
"The Forum of Trajan, of course, I meant that."
But she knew that Nan knew she had meant the Forum Romanum.