“They’ve got a lot of snow in Bologna,” she said to the red-haired man. “Do you think there’ll be snow in Florence?”

“There was, but I don’t think it lasted. Look at it now,” and he pointed past her out the window where bright sun was shining over the everlasting sweetness of the Italian countryside. “Do you live in Florence?”

“No, in Rome. I’m just going to visit.” Always the explanations. All he really wants to know is how an obvious foreigner like me is just as obviously not a passing tourist. “I teach in Rome,” she said extravagantly. “But it’s getting so expensive there I’m thinking of moving to Florence.” If he wanted to follow it up now, he could. He had said before that he was getting off in Bologna to make a connection for Ferrara.

She thought of a story by Corrado Alvaro in which an Italian salesman going to Germany on business offers some of his Capri wine and oranges to the German girl sitting next to him on the train. He is going to Berlin; she, too, but says that she is getting off in Munich before going on because she wants to break up the journey. Why doesn’t he get off in Munich with her, she proposes; it’s a beautiful city and she will show it to him. Then after a good night’s sleep in a good hotel, they will arrive fresh in Berlin the following day. But the man stays on the train and the girl gets off alone in Munich.

As Marguerite prepared to get off in Florence, she gave the man back his paper. She got down her bag and said good-bye as the train pulled into the station. (Was I saying “Good-bye” or “Why don’t you want me?”)

The train stopped, she was in Florence, and she decided to be purposeful as befitted her beginning freedom. She was on the way, and though white-rabbit-like she stopped every so often to pull out a pocket watch and see how late it was getting, she still hoped, at bottom, to make it in time. Ever upward, ad astra per aspera. She pulled a sheet of mimeographed paper marked “American Schools in Florence” from her handbag and checked an address. Yes, there in Piazza Santa Maria Novella, right across from the station, was an American school run by a Mr. Selph offering courses in English language and literature for Italians. She might get a job there. And what more auspicious than a Mr. Selph as first encounter in her resettlement plans? Old Verdile was always preaching the self and now Mr. Selph, himself, lay right on her path.

Marguerite crossed the piazza. At the address of the American school, she found herself in a dank passageway between a grocery and an auto-parts store and she felt her confidence vanish. There was Selph’s name on a letterbox. But there was no doorman, no elevator, no businesslike plaque naming the school; there were no people coming and going. It was a drab, gray hallway in a quasi-tenement and she fled.