“No. No. That’s my grandson, my daughter’s boy.” The Contessa smiled. “Nearly two meters tall.”

“Something in the food out there,” put in the old man. “All so tall, so stringy. Something in the food.” He took on the peculiarly serious look Italians assume when delivering lay opinions on scientific subjects. “Non ingrassa, ma fa crescere.”

The old lady got up suddenly and came back with another photograph, of two young men in a sailing boat. “Our sons,” she said. She sat down again and looked at her husband. “They both died in the war.”

The Conte made a movement as though to reach out and touch her. “One died in the war. The other—”

Across the room his wife returned his gesture with her fingertips. Husband and wife seemed, still, both so spirited that this grief would have to pursue them to the end of their lives in order to crush them completely. “The other,” she explained, “was missing, then a prisoner. He did come back from the war, but within six months he was dead of cancer. I still feel he died from the war. I can’t help believing that without the war he would be alive.” She leaned back, pressing her hands together in her lap, not resigned to being so sad.

The old man said, “My dear.”

The Contessa touched her guest’s arm apologetically. “You mustn’t think we make everyone sad with our story. I keep the photographs here. I like to have them out, and we’re only here in the summer, when hardly anyone visits us. In our apartment in Perugia I keep very little from the past—except furniture, of course. So much furniture, from both our families. Now some of it is here, upstairs, but this house was never intended for antique furniture.”

“We had the idea, when the children were babies, of making this house for them.” The Conte lifted his hands to invoke the surroundings. “We have land here, and there was another villa that belonged to us, a mile or so away, now sold. But this was to be their house. No antiques, nothing to spoil, nothing to get scolded about. No cliffs to fall off, no pond deep enough to drown in. Everything easy, nothing intimidating. Just for children—ours and theirs.”

“What a sweet idea. What a sweet house.”

“It is a sweet house,” the Contessa said. “I was worried, while it was being built, in case it mightn’t have a nice nature when it was finished. Because houses have that too, like people, something they’re born with; things happen to them later, of course, but good disposition is more mysterious. This one turned out well. It really is simpatica.”

Mrs. Drew put her hand on the chintz cushion beside her, a departing gesture. “I must be going.”