“Ecco. Superstrada. O Dio, it’s all very well building these new roads, but the way they speak about it you’d think it was an act of Divine Creation. A cousin of ours was here last month, talking as if no one had ever seen a new road before. ‘The future of Italy is in these roads,’ he kept saying. Well, the past of Italy is in the roads too—they made roads from Rome to the ends of the earth. Now they’re at it again, that’s all.”

“Something for the road, that’s it!” The Conte leapt to his feet. “That lemonade doesn’t do anything for you. A drop of something stronger, to give you courage for the journey?”

“No, really not, thank you.”

“Well, you’re right, it doesn’t give you courage at all.” The old man flopped back into his chair. “When our daughter went out to South America for the first time, in ’49, we decided to have a bottle of champagne always at hand on a table—in an ice bucket, you know, with a couple of glasses. The idea was to cheer ourselves up from time to time.” He made one of his absurd, endearing gestures of total capitulation. “And it didn’t help at all! Not at all!”

Mrs. Drew put her hand out once more on the cushion beside her. “What pretty material.”

“Those are my colors,” said the Contessa. “Lilacs and lavenders and blues. I found the material in Florence in the Via Tornabuoni. I loved it so much that I sent some to my daughter, but the sun must be different there, for it faded immediately.”

“Ma che dici?” her husband asked indulgently. “How can the sun be different?”

“I mean—the light must be stronger. Or her chairs were more exposed.” The old lady’s mouth drooped at the thought of the life she would never even have a glimpse of. Then she turned to her guest. “Let us show you the rest of the house.”

Upstairs the rooms were again large, cool, and pleasant. The old couple led their visitor through two or three bedrooms and a room with a piano before the Conte paused at a pair of double doors in a delighted certainty of surprising her. Throwing the doors open, he preceded Mrs. Drew across the room and opened the shutters.

“My bedroom,” the Contessa said.

The room, in contrast to the rest of the house, was richly furnished with eighteenth-century Venetian pieces. Commodes, chairs, tables, fantastically contoured and painted, stood around the walls, and between the windows an immense mirror, perhaps eight feet tall, mistily reflected the splendid bed that took up half the room. A vast canopy, containing a smaller, bell-shaped canopy of the same material, was supported by twisted and gilded posts and descended in scalloped hangings drawn back with gold silk cords. Canopy, hangings, and bedcover were all of the same peacock-blue and gold embroidery.