Marguerite’s idea of what Gillo’s friend Alberto Morosini would be like (an older man, yes, but Walter Pidgeon) continued to linger. Each time they remet she was startled again by the splayfooted professor who snorted and blew through his nose and had small brown furtive eyes sunk in the hollows on either side of that huge nose. In winter Alberto wore a thick brown loden coat and a hat whose brim turned up all the way around. His walk, with that rocking toed-out gait, made him seem ludicrous like a performing Russian bear, but he was unaware of anything except being himself.

The day she got on the rapido to go to Rome, she went with no precise plan in mind, but with at least a willing suspension of disbelief in Alberto Morosini. She could be reached now if he felt like reaching.

Pazienza, she thought with the shrug of shoulders she was learning from Italian life; if things hadn’t gone exactly as they should have, it still wasn’t Gloversville. She saw the Italian women, how sure they were of themselves, how well they dressed and carried themselves; and she despised her soft, round, childish face and Italian-American uneasiness. She could learn from Alberto. And he was a poet.

When Marguerite arrived in Rome the skies were blue and the Roman wall through which her taxi passed to get to Corso d’Italia was tawny with the elegant light of late day. She went straight to Alberto’s place and was shown to his room in the Danes’ apartment by the scowling housekeeper, Rina. (“She’s fine with bachelors,” Alberto had said of her, “but she doesn’t like women. I’m the only one in the household with a vocation for women.”)

Alberto’s room was a large one at the end of the passage. A deep studio couch faced a low table, on which anemones were arranged in a bowl next to a silver candlestick and piles of books. The furniture was large and old-fashioned: an enormous wardrobe, a writing desk that occupied the whole end of the room in front of flowery drapes drawn across the windows, and a great stuffed armchair with a leather floor-lamp next to it. In a corner there was a sideboard and a small table spread with a blue and white embroidered tea cloth on which stood a hot plate, a silver sugar bowl, a teaspoon, and a jar of petits-beurres. Marguerite felt a pull of tenderness for the man whose room this was. It was charming and orderly, and like Alberto, restfully démodé. She sank into the fat armchair and her glance was caught by a painting on the wall opposite. It was a painting in tenuous pastel of a young girl with thoughtful eyes and a small mouth, seated and holding in her lap a large, almost voluptuous lemon. It looks like me, she thought.