Even so, Marguerite felt dispirited and ponderous as she sat there having the contessa and secretary present her appealingly to the owner, a wary old lady with a cigarette held tightly in bright red lips who had already had bad experiences with Americans, including several husbands. The villa had once been let as a high-class boarding school for American girls, and the girls had defaced it and left it bankrupt. “What a bore it all was,” said the old lady, keeping the butt clamped tightly between her lips.

She wanted 90,000 lire per month, three months’ rent in advance, and the lease made out for two years; she had, after all, to make some sort of kitchen in the rooms and move beds up from the cellar, she said (as visions of ancient damp-rot passed through Marguerite’s head) and one didn’t do that lightly with today’s prices, but only when there was a certain guarantee. “It’s a bore,” said the old lady, wanting to be off to town to her bridge game.

Florence was depressing: a city of aging American and English women. For two weeks Marguerite had been there, living in a pension and taking meals with a Miss Cameron of Toronto, a retired teacher who was doing the art galleries and relayed back her sights at each sitting. It was a city of Miss Camerons; of resident widows who rented out rooms in their chilly villas; of touring widows. The city was filled with them at all the concerts and in all the tearooms. A glut of old women and college girls doing the Renaissance in their Junior Year Abroad.

Marguerite signed the lease, then returned to Rome to pack her things. No use spending money at a hotel, Alberto had told her, so she went to her old home to stay.

Angela was furious. “Are you crazy? A separation is automatically annulled when you sleep under the same roof—not even in the same bed.”

“Who’s going to report it—you?” said Marguerite. “You don’t have to mention it all over town.” The exhilaration of the trip to America had evaporated, leaving her beached in the late Rome spring. Florence weighed on her. The sense of being caught in a crevice between the Appennines was physically oppressive; the recollection of other, better times there, wearying.

“Why do you have to go to Florence?” Angela asked brusquely. Marguerite was irritated at this echo of her father’s question, “Are you forced to go to Florence?”

Her irritation was the mark of her uncertainty. Why Florence? Why even Italy? Why anyplace? It would all be the same. She was part of the permanently dispossessed. She couldn’t belong completely in the States anymore and had never belonged completely in Europe. Where was the goddam place her Senior Banquet had promised her in the world?