His second thought, also accompanied by a sense of irritation, was that Mrs. Murray, as Giuseppina had suggested, was quite beautiful. Her face was almost a countenance—a pensive sunburned oval elaborated with brown eyes, a short nose, and a defenseless smile. Her fair hair, streaked by the sun, was coiled around her head and drawn to one side, in the style that was being worn in Italy that year—it was 1957. Her cotton dress was printed with blue flowers. About twenty-five or six, he supposed, looking at her almost with indignation, as though she had brought some disturbance into his house. She answered his look with her unsuspecting smile.

“My husband sends his apologies,” she was saying. “He had to go to Florence for the day, on business.”

“He is writing a guidebook?” asked Vittorio, wondering whether Francesco had got it right.

Apparently not, for Mrs. Murray hesitated, wrinkled her brow, and then said: “Well, a sort of guidebook. A description of the paintings, actually, in Siena. He went to Florence to see about reproductions. We expect to be here about two months, but it depends how long it all takes.” She paused, and when he said nothing went on: “I believe you lived in England?”

“For nine years,” he replied, thinking how remote his exile seemed to him. “I went there in 1937, after my wife’s death, and came back in ’46.”

“I hope they were nice to you.”

He smiled. “To be there at all, an Italian during the war, meant that I suffered. They realized that, and allowed me the stature of my condition. I have never known people so polite. And in my profession—I am a classicist—I could find immediately those who shared my interests.”

“Well, I’m glad,” she said, as though the responsibility had been her own.

“In England, life is a long process of composing oneself,” he continued. “For us, the English are as strange as Orientals, with their formalities, their conventions, their silences. I should never have known, had I not lived there, how vulnerable they can be, and how sentimental.”

On a tinkle of plates and silver, Giuseppina entered, bearing the tea tray. Vittorio, who took his tea each afternoon from a chipped ceramic mug, hastily cleared a space. The cake, ostentatiously intact, had been placed on a silver platter.

He began to spread the cups and saucers. “Or would you prefer a glass of something—vin santo…?”

“No,” she said, “this is lovely. Shall I cut the cake?”

When they were established across the cups and plates, he asked: “Your husband—is he an artist himself?”