"The signorina is fortunate. We have just one berth vacant," answered the conductor in Italian. "This way, please," and taking me along the corridor, he rapped at the door of the compartment to which he had just shown the mysterious woman.
I left it to the conductor to explain my presence, and after entering, closed and bolted the door behind me.
"I regret that I've been compelled to disturb you, but this is the only berth vacant," I said in English, in a tone of apology, for when I noticed that her black eyes flashed inquiringly at me, I deemed it best to be on friendly terms with her.
"Don't mention it; I'm English," she answered, quite affably. "I'm pleased that you're English. I feared some horrid foreign woman would be put in to be my travelling companion. Are you going far?"
"To the frontier," I responded vaguely. The extent of my journey depended upon the length of hers.
Then, after a further exchange of courtesies, we prepared for the night and entered our narrow berths, she choosing the upper one, and I the lower.
As far as I could judge, she was fifty, perhaps more, though she was still extremely handsome, her beauty being of a Southern type, and her black hair and coiffure, with huge tortoise-shell comb, giving her a Spanish appearance. She wore several beautiful rings, and I noticed that on her neck, concealed during the day by her bodice, was some tiny charm, suspended by a thin gold chain. Her voice and bearing were those of an educated woman, and she was buxom without being at all stout.
The roar of the train and the grinding of the wheels as we whirled through those seventy odd suffocating tunnels that separate Pisa from Genoa rendered sleep utterly impossible, so by mutual agreement we continued our conversation.
She seemed, like the "Ancient Mariner," to be needing someone to whom she could tell her story. She wanted an audience able to realise the fine points of her play. From the outset she seemed bursting with items about herself, little dreaming that I was acting as spy upon her.
I secretly congratulated myself upon my astuteness, and proceeded to draw her out. Her slight accent puzzled me, but it was due, I discovered, to the fact that her mother had been Portuguese. She seemed to label everything with her own intellectual acquirements. To me, a perfect stranger, she chatted during that night-journey about her fine figure and her power over men, about her ambitions and her friends. But her guardian interfered with her friends. He was an old man, and jealous; had her money invested, and would not allow her to look at a man. If she paid the least attention to any man in particular, she received no money. She was not forty, she told me, and her guardian, who was also in the train, was over seventy.