Half an hour afterwards my husband came in, and though I did not look up I heard him say, in a tone of indulgent sympathy that cut me to the quick:
"You've been playing the wrong part, my child. A Madonna, yes, but a Venus, no! It's not your métier."
"What's the good? What's the good? What's the good?" I asked myself.
I thought my heart was broken.
FORTY-SEVENTH CHAPTER
With inexpressible relief I heard the following day that we were to leave for Rome immediately.
Alma was to go with us, but that did not matter to me in the least. Outside the atmosphere of this place, so artificial, so unrelated to nature, her power over my husband would be gone. Once in the Holy City everything would be different. Alma would be different, I should be different, above all my husband would be different. I should take him to the churches and basilicas; I should show him the shrines and papal processions, and he would see me in my true "part" at last!
But what a deep disappointment awaited me!
On reaching Rome we put up at a fashionable hotel in the new quarter of the Ludovisi, and although that was only a few hundred yards from the spot on which I had spent nine happy years it seemed to belong to another world altogether. Instead of the church domes and the monastery bells, there were the harsh clang of electric trams, the thrum and throb of automobiles, the rattle of cars and the tramp of soldiers.