Perhaps Miss Guiseppina thought that one can have too much of even a good thing; that the name of Pace was quite enough for the house, and that, in consequence, she ought to do her best to banish it under all other circumstances. She certainly succeeded; for she led her poor old widow-mother and their single servant such a life as to give them a lively foretaste of what Purgatory—to say no worse—might possibly be.
Ah! if she could but have cut off the Pace from her own name as cleanly as she cut off all possible peace from the two poor women who were doomed, for their sins, to live under the same roof with her!
But, despite the endeavours during thirty odd long years, she had never had one single chance of doing so; and it riled her to the core. Schoolfellows had floated away upon the sea of matrimony, friends had become mothers—grandmothers—and yet she remained Guiseppina Pace, as she ever had remained; and with no prospect of a change.
How she learned to loathe the sight of a bridal procession; and how she taught mother and maid to tremble at the passing of the same! How the news of a projected marriage stirred her bile, and how her dearest friends hastened to her with any matrimonial news they could gather, or invent! It was wonderful to see, and pleasant enough to witness—from a distance.
Guiseppina and her mother occupied a small flat in Via Santa Teresa: Guiseppina's bed-room and their one sitting-room looking into the street; her mother's room, the kitchen and a sort of coal-hole in which the servant slept being at the back of the house.
It was summer. People pushed perspiringly for the shady side of the street, puffed and panted under pillar and portico. The public gardens were besieged; fans fluttered everywhere; iced-beer and pezzi duri were in constant requisition.
It was on a Friday afternoon. Guiseppina had sunk, exhausted with the heat and exasperated with the flies, into a large arm-chair opposite her bed, and was sitting there fanning herself violently and trying to catch a breath of fresh air from the widely-opened window beside her. But there was no air, fresh or otherwise; and nothing but the languid steps of the passers in the street below was heard. Not the roll of a wheel, the hoof of a horse, or the yelp of a dog. It seemed as if the whole place had been given over to the cruel glare of sunshine and the persevering impertinence of flies.
It was just one of those days which make one long intensely for the shade of ilexes upon the sea shore, and the swish of idle waters upon the beach.
And Guiseppina did long, and had longed, and had finally driven her poor mother in tears to her room with reproaches for not being able to go for a month to Pegli, as, that very morning, their upper floor neighbours, the Castelles, had gone—and—and—and—: the usual litany—the usual nagging—the usual temper; hinc ille lacrimæ.
"Why should she alone," she exclaimed to herself sitting there, "remain to roast in town, while all her friends—? Ah, it was too cruel! If she could only—!"