“You look like the Blessed Damozel,” she said, then regretted it, wondering if the girl might say afterward to her husband, “Think she’s a bit dykey?” A single person was vulnerable, open to any accusation, never getting the benefit of any doubt. She studied the girl’s face as it turned like a sunflower toward her. Would she be a loving wife, a laughing wife, or a dull, opinionated one? It was like looking at a newborn baby, trying to discover the resemblance that would later manifest itself.

“How lucky to be able to rent this.” Marian was waving her other hand at the window. “A place like this.”

Helena Palmer nodded. “And not just a matter of having the money either, or the year to spare; but the taste and enterprise to do it. Most people get fixed in their ways.” She meant herself, fixed as an assistant curator at a museum in Boston.

“They come from Philadelphia,” Marian said, as if that might have simplified the decision. Marian came from South Kensington and had never crossed the Atlantic.

“Besides, you know Jimmy’s working here.” She enjoyed referring to a Personage as Jimmy.

“On a thesis, is it?” Miss Palmer asked, and the two in front smiled indulgently: an American pastime.

“To be fair,” the young man said, being fair, “it’s actually part of the new book. Another sociological study. I liked the last one. Got something to say all right, has Jimmy.” Here the gravel made a sharp turn that took them over the breast of the hill. Rounding the curve, the man at the wheel brought the car to a sudden stop.

His wife cried out.

Miss Palmer said, “Good God.”

In surmounting the ridge they had come to the edge of a wide valley floored with fields and olive groves; but rising, on its opposite side, into a long, closely-wooded hillside. This far hillside stood against the lilac sky; seeming vaster than it probably was, as Florentine hills do. Through all its length it was a single sheet of flame.

At the turn the road widened, providing a shelf that was at present used as a lookout—two or three small Fiats were parked there, and half a dozen Vespas. Their owners stood in silence, or sat on the low edge of the retaining wall, staring out across the valley.

“Oh, Robin, I can smell it,” the girl said. Some shift of the wind, or of their own awareness, had carried the smell of burning into the car.

“Hear it, too.” The sound—a hissing, a crackling, a roar—was coming clearly across the valley.

“I saw the glow,” said Miss Palmer. “And thought it was the sun.”

Another Fiat now drove up behind them. “Let’s get on to the villa,” Robin said, and they drove again, parallel to the inferno. The two women stared at it without words.