That evening in the pensione a short, businesslike, and soberly dressed man carrying a leather case had entered her room. He sat down, opened his case, and took out a book. It was, he said, the volume of his recently published poems, and he asked if she wanted to hear some. Of course, she said, wanting to comb her hair. He read odes to Keats, Shakespeare, Catullus, and Goethe; a ballad for springtime, an elegy to his dead mother, lyrics to the unknown love he still awaited. All the time she was aware of the chill in the unheated room and the growing hunger in her stomach as the evening grew late.

When he stopped she told him they were very beautiful. He said she was sensitive as well as lovely and inscribed the book for her: “A Lesbia Purissima.”

They went out to dinner, and the problem of conversation between them wearied and depressed her. When she didn’t understand Italian he tried French, crushing every drop of elegance from that language in the grip of his merciless pronunciation. Later (years and years later), Alberto Morosini would maintain with conviction that they had spoken Latin at their first meeting, that he had courted his wife in the language of Catullus to Lesbia. He called her Margherita though she corrected him.

“And Gillo?” he said in one of the lulls of their conversation. “How is he? I saw his wife not long ago and she said his future plans were still uncertain.”

Marguerite stared unbelievingly at the chattering man next to her. What wife? What plans? Wasn’t the plan that Gillo come to Italy as soon as he could and then he and Marguerite would return together to England to wherever he had his appointment? He had never said so but wasn’t it marriage they were heading to?

Alberto’s chatter imploded, shattering inward to the pit of her stomach as he continued, oblivious, raising his voice louder in the silly effort to help her understand. “They’ve had a hard life, you know, Gillo and his wife. They married very young before the child was born, while he was still studying. He wasn’t ready . . . it’s been a trap for him, the end of certain hopes. He’s had to abandon testing himself out as a writer and to prepare himself for something more practical. He’s been lucky only in having the Englishwoman who got him a grant for studying in London.”

With that Marguerite understood about the Englishwoman from the British Council, too.