“But it’s the only solution, Angela! I’ve told you. I know the town and can find work there. Weezy will be near enough for Alberto to visit and she has an American school there.”

“Do you have to work?”

“Why, of course! How else can I manage? Alberto can’t take care of a place in Florence plus the place here plus the schooling. Plus Tina’s trips back and forth. But I’ve told you all this. Basta. I’m sick of talking about it.”

“If you weren’t so obstinate about Florence—and there’s more work to be found in Rome, you know that—then you could have my place while I’m in England on my assignment. I don’t want to rent it because I’ll come down every so often, but you could stay there and keep an eye on it for me.”

“No . . . no . . . the whole point is to get away. I even thought of America, Australia. Can’t you understand?”

“No. You Americans are too businesslike for me. All plans and solutions and fresh starts.”

Back in Florence, checking in again at the pensione of old ladies while she waited for work to be completed on her apartment at the villa, she met Richard Wareham, who had just arrived to take over the ministry of the Episcopal church there. The Reverend Richard Wareham, in a plaid sports jacket and deep orange turtleneck sweater, with the accent of Virginia, William & Mary, and Jack Daniel’s bourbon.

He was sandy-haired, blue-eyed, slight, very socially adept with the ladies, and single.

“My daughters are Episcopal. You’ll meet the youngest, Weezy, when she comes up after she finishes the last weeks of school in Rome,” Marguerite told him in their conversation. It had been the fiery Tina, like a melodramatic Anna Magnani, who had gotten Weezy to go into the Church of England with her, in her own outburst of enthusiasm for the language of its ritual, which was a daily occurrence at St. Gregory’s school in Rome.

In his rich voice, with his attentive southern regard, Richard had encouraged Marguerite. “I’m delighted! Lovely! Glad to have them. And you?”

As he talked Marguerite recognized one whose social ease came from generations of leisurely exchange in families whose language had always been theirs and the command of it exact. (”You can get topics for your discussions at home,” Miss Stack, her sixth-grade teacher, had imagined years ago, not knowing that families like the Scalzos were not like Warehams and didn’t converse on Current Events at the dinner table.) Marguerite had known these Virginia families when she and Alberto had lived in Washington. She knew their closeness of family, their relaxed association with the land learned through centuries of ownership, their undeniable class in manner and speech. They weren’t endlessly occupied with finding themselves and knowing themselves, for this had all been done for them way back.