Except for Jason’s peevish behavior, Tina was content with the night. The opaqueness, the singing, and the softened views made it all dreamlike. A servant passed demitasses of strong coffee followed by cigarettes and chocolates. The rocks gave forth Mistrà, grappa, and brandy. They were at ease in a perfect setting not yet despoiled, and just over the mountains, farther down the boot but not that far, was the land of her people.

And yet how far! How far from the count’s elegant domain and well-appointed table; how far from Venice, where her father’s bourgeois family lines were so well rooted; how far from anything, except, strangely, the distant America that alone had wanted their labor and patience.

Tina reflected on her inland people born just hours away from that pleasant setting, but not on the sea where songs were sung to the moon and fishing boats went out at night with their lanterns to attract a catch. Her people had hoed miserable little fields of rocks or gathered ginestra from the mountainsides to make into cord. And then one day they had put their things in a shawl, together with their last bread for the journey, and had walked to the sea to get the boat to Naples and from there to America. A long trip, a long time ago.

Strange currents were at work in Tina. She was both elated and still tipsy from all the drinking. Ferruccio was holding her hand and pressing his body close to hers. The music rose and fell like the sea, like her heart.

“Well, what about this trip to Calabria. Don’t you think you need an Italian?

“But what Italian?” she answered back, playing his game, smiling over her liqueur glass and looking at him full in the eyes.

“A futurist, of course. You should have a futurist in your present.”

That was what stirred her about Ferruccio; he was so clearly a present excitement—something completely transient, uncertain, and adventurous. As different as possible from Jason, whom she loved and was afraid of because his very permanency and steadiness were making unanswerable demands upon her.

She looked around at the group and then at Ferruccio with a glance of complicity.

“Shall we go to Castagna? This very night?” he whispered close to her. “I’ll be your Italian guide.”

“What, in July? You have to be crazy!”

“Let’s be crazy.”

Life, her mother used to say, is no more than choices. The wine, the unsettled air of the evening, the setting of the old tower all helped Tina make her choice. In amore, vince chi fugge—that, thought Tina tipsily, is why I’m leaving Jason; because love was a trap; because it was too good being with him; because she was afraid it couldn’t last or that it would last, and at twenty-three permanence was as bad as fleetingness. In love, as the proverb said, the one who flees wins.