After the encounter they walked through the halls of the museum speaking guardedly of who they were. His plans, unlike hers, were so definite! He knew what he was in London for: The courses he was following at the university would get him the fellowship that would eventually win him a chair in English at an Italian university; he knew who and where the specialists were in their fields and which of them were most likely to help him; he knew how long he had to hold out in English on a teaching fellowship and just what book (Wordsworth) he had to write to get him back to Italy. He knew why for everything.

“Even why you spoke to me in front of the vases?” she asked. He wore a beret, he was Italian. She could imagine loving him. She already loved him.

“Of course. You are attractive and you looked as foreign and out-of-place as I. It was my luck you even know some Italian.”

“My luck is better—you know more Italian.”

Gillo invited her to tea in the commons at the nearby university, where they had to stand for a while in a long line of students. He looked about impatiently, his amber eyes cold and derisive. He was already a dottore, he had told her.

“I don’t know how it is in Italy,” she said, trying to lighten the wait, “but here you queue for everything—buses, stamps, and even tea with trifle.”

“Italians don’t queue,” he said scornfully, “not for trifle and not for the pope.”

“What else are Italians like?”

“Melancholy.”

“Why?”

“If we didn’t have our melancholy what would we be? A race of clowns. It’s the only thing that redeems us.”

The next evening Marguerite put on dangle earrings and a black dress to dine with Gillo on wilted hors d’oeuvres and dance stiffly to South American tunes in a medium-fancy restaurant off Piccadilly Circus to which he had invited her.

Leaving, they hurled a pocketful of small change at the ticket window in the underground, sure they were being gouged, but no matter; Goodge Street, please. Good. Goodge. Gouge. He had a bottle of grappa, and they stopped for a moment in Russell Square to drink from it. “Che gelida manina,” she said from her opera studies with De Mariani as she put her cold hand in his. He laughed, and outside the School for African Studies he caught her to him and kissed her hard. They went to his room in the dorm.

“Here we are in East Africa,” he laughed, explaining that an African student had had it before him. But gaiety was gone; her muscles, nerves, bones—even her teeth, she noted with curiosity—felt rigid with apprehension.