He held her close to him and said, “I will make a real human being out of you. We will live a life of art together. You are a creative person with much to express. Only remember that one has to love the other’s defects as well as his virtues—maybe more. Remember, too, the classic position is detachment.”

“Even in bed?” she asked, responding to his caresses.

Marguerite continued her Italian courses in Florence. She liked this interlude of aloneness with Florence during the week and Alberto’s being with her on weekends.

Things went well between them except when he unwittingly offended her sensibilities about the culture she was acquiring.

“What rubbish to give foreigners!” he said when she told him she was reading Pulci, Ficino, Poliziano. “You don’t want to turn out like those American Express ladies who go through the Uffizi and think they have to look at every single work in every room when it’s enough to go straight to the Primavera and one or two others.” She felt ridiculed.

“But, Alberto,” she protested—her eyes troubled, her voice unsteady with a kind of smothered indignation—“it’s different for you. These things were part of your background from always. But just think of what my background was—nothing! We don’t even know who we are any further than my grandparents, and you’ve got family trees right back to the thirteenth century. It’s only with my parents that reading and writing and speaking correctly began for us. That’s the difference between us!”

He understood her resentment because he was a compassionate man, even when he told her in jest, “That’s a big difference. It’s a good thing your Calabrian grandparents emigrated to America and made it possible for a northern Italian like me to marry you. Not many northerners would let themselves in for marriage with a terrone.”

“Tant pis for them—you northern intellectuals could use new blood and brains. My grandmother, for one, had native intelligence.”

“Then we are a good combination for our children: my beauty and your native Calabrian intelligence. And once we do have children all this cultural mania of yours will evaporate.”

“Oh, you’re impossible, Alberto! Don’t you understand I don’t want it to evaporate! What am I paying for?” She sounded just like a Scalzo.

“Già,” he laughed. “Americans can buy anything.”