Jenny’s birthday was on the seventeenth of January. She and Francesca were having a dinner-party in the Campagna, in a small osteria in the Via Appia Nuova. Ahlin, Heggen, Gram, and Miss Palm, the Danish nurse, made up the party.
From the tram terminus they walked two and two along the sunny, white road. Spring was in the air, the brown Campagna had a greyish-green tinge; the daisies, which had been blossoming more or less all the winter, began to spread all over in silvery spots, and the impatient clusters of tender green shoots on the elder bushes along the fences had grown.
The larks hung trembling high up in the blue-white sky, and there was a haze over the city and the ugly, red blocks of houses it had sprinkled over the plain. Beyond the massive arches of the canal, the Alban mountains, with small white villages, showed faintly through the mist.
Jenny walked in front with Gram, who carried her grey dust-coat. She was radiantly beautiful in a black silk dress; he had never seen her in anything but her grey dress or coat and skirt. It seemed to him almost as if he walked with a new and strange woman. Her waist was so small in the shiny black material that her form above it seemed round and supple; the bodice was cut open in a deep square in front, and her hair and skin were dazzlingly fair. She wore a big black hat, in which he had seen her before, but without specially noticing it. Even her pink beads looked quite different with the black dress.
They ate out of doors in the sunshine under the vine, which threw a shadow in the form of a fine bluish net over the tablecloth. Miss Palm and Heggen wanted to decorate the table with daisies; the macaroni was quite ready, but the others had to wait until they came back with the decorations. The food was good and the wine was excellent; Cesca had brought fruit, and coffee, which she was going to make herself, to make sure it should be good. After dinner Miss Palm and Heggen investigated marble reliefs and inscriptions that had been found on the site and fitted into the masonry of the house. After a while they disappeared round a corner. Ahlin remained sitting at the table smoking, his eyes half shut against the glare.
The osteria lay at the foot of a small hill. Gram and Jenny walked up the slope at random. She picked small wild flowers that grew in the yellow earth.
“There are masses of these at Monte Testaccio. Have you been there, Mr. Gram?”
“Yes, several times. I went there yesterday to have a look at the Protestant cemetery. The camelia trees are covered with blossoms, and in the old part I found anemones in the grass.”
“Yes, they are out now. Somewhere at Via Cassia, beyond Ponte Molle, there are lots of them. Gunnar gave me some almond blossoms this morning; they have them already at the Spanish stairs, but I daresay they are forced.”
They reached the top and began strolling about. Jenny walked with her eyes on the ground; the short grass was springing up everywhere, and variegated thistle-leaves and some big, silver-grey ones were basking in the sun. They walked towards a solitary wall, which rose out of a mound of gravel; the Campagna extended around them in every direction, grey-green below the light spring skies and the warbling larks. Its boundaries were lost in the haze of the sun. The city beyond them seemed a mirage only, the mountains and the clouds melted together, and the yellow arches of the canal appeared, only to vanish again in the mist. The countless ruins were reduced to small, glistening pieces of walls, strewn about on the green, and pines and eucalyptus trees by the red or ochre houses stood solitary and dark on this fine day of early spring.