The baroness laughed loudly, and said in a well-cultivated husky voice as she pointed with her holder toward a man with a tanned, wrinkled face, “My Koko and I—there he is with those charming women—yes, Koko and I make our friend the count jealous because of the perfect freedom we have in our henhouse. I have a home comme il faut in Naples full of boring treasures, but here it’s all plastic and freedom and I adore it. The count teases because he hasn’t yet achieved the inner freedom to live in a henhouse.”

“Clever woman, the baronessa,” Ferruccio said under his breath to Tina. “And a real title.”

There were a number of other guests: Dr. Arndt, a Jungian psychiatrist from Zurich who came each year to the hotel to purge himself, he said, of Swissness and to take in the pleasures of the South, a necessary balance in life; Gianluca Grondi, the Socialist leader, who was there to attest to the count’s tolerant attitude not only toward the Left but toward local tradition, for the Grondis, after all, had been the original gentry in those parts; the well-known author Giorgio Fermo, all in white, his candid blue eyes shining from the brown of his face, and at his side a new companion, a tall woman who wore her hair in a chignon and her face with an expression of disdain; a woman administrator of Italia Nostra, an environmentalist group; and a short, dark couple from Sicily, just back from Alaska and the northwestern states, who would have been eager to speak of America with Tina, but Ferruccio deftly steered her away.

As Tina looked about for Jason she saw him now with some tall, blond young people. Ferruccio identified them as Sisi—the count’s daughter, and his hostess while her mother was in Geneva finishing a course in cybernetics—and her two brothers. They were slim, pale blonds with cool looks of aloofness in their eyes, and they made a startling contrast to the dark Jason and to Filippo Merici, a collector of ethnic and regional music who was going to sing and play his antique lute-guitar later that evening.

Ferruccio, who seemed to notice everything, leaned very close to her and said in her ear so that his breath ruffled the wisps of hair around it, “Don’t worry about your friend, he’s in the best of company.”

“But am I?” she retorted.

“Ah! you American women,” Ferruccio laughed warmly.

So that’s who I am, Tina thought as she sipped another drink and looked about at the groupings of handsome people in that splendid setting. Not one of these gorgeous Italians, but an acerbic American. She shrugged her shoulders, not unhappy.