Gillo had not come to Italy with her. During the last days of his summer course, the British Council person had returned to London and was arranging interviews for him for his future post, he said, and so he couldn’t leave on the boat-train with Marguerite. He had to stay on in England and then he would join her in Rome. After a holiday in Italy they would go back to England together to wherever he would be teaching. He arranged for her to be met in Rome by his friend Alberto Morosini, who would be helpful to her. Alberto would be at the station to meet her train with a red flower in his buttonhole, and she was to carry a white one. In case they missed each other, Gillo gave her Alberto’s address and telephone number.

But the trip to Italy was long, and she became resentful of the disarrangement of all their plans. She had wanted Gillo to be with her in Italy, not some stranger named Alberto Morosini. Impulsively she got off the train in Florence instead of going on to Rome and signed up there for the course for foreign students at the university. Soon she was tired, lonely, and sorry she had snubbed poor Alberto.

She wrote to him. He answered saying he was glad to know she had arrived safely, and as things would have it, he would be coming to Florence for a meeting concerning a literary prize. He would come and call on Marguerite.

He came not only to her little hotel-pension between the station and the market that sprawled around San Lorenzo but right to the door of her room, knocking at it insistently. Marguerite had been dressing to meet him downstairs at the time they had set. Flustered at his banging, she called out “Un momento!” and when he continued she found herself suddenly unable to put together enough Italian or French or Spanish to tell him to go away, she’d come when she was ready. She simply opened the door as she was, in slippers, her hair uncombed.

Never (and the premonition was intense in the air as Alberto Morosini bowed over her hand and entered the besieged room), from their first meeting, from when they first laid eyes on each other, would things go exactly as planned between Marguerite and Alberto. As if they were in a film, there was always some element of unpredictable comedy and havoc that filtered into whatever scene they were playing. There was, forever after between them, a sensation of improviso, of crazy ad lib, of things getting out of control and taking their own unsuspected direction.