She would remind herself to pass that on to Dr. Verdile.

On the other side of the brown ditch that was the Arno, on the Palazzo Pitti side, she went to find the well-known English-language school founded some fifty or sixty years before by an educated spinster lady who had undertaken to teach the children of the American colony in Florence. The lady had died, the school was declining, and when Marguerite arrived there was only the cleaning woman to talk to.

While she examined linoleum prints along the wall of a large cold room, the cleaning woman telephoned the director, Mr. Faust, at his home. Another symbolic name, thought Marguerite, and left before Faust came, unable to cope with any other decline and genteel shabbiness than her own; unable to deal with such jokes as Mr. Selph and Mr. Faust.

I will not think of schools for the moment, I will attend to a place to live. She took out another mimeographed sheet, which listed housing agents, and walked down some distance from the Palazzo Pitti to the firm with an American name. The street door opened on a foyer filled with ornamental plants and big pieces of Renaissance furniture. No one was there, but voices came from a mezzanine. Marguerite felt uncomfortable standing there alone with no one to welcome her or ask her to state her business. And what was her business? How could she settle on a place to live if she wasn’t yet separated, and how could she think of settling in Florence if she had no work there? Jesus, couldn’t she even remember that elementary rule, first things first?

She rushed out the door.

Actually, she told herself, the very first thing to find was work, then the place to live, then the school for Weezy. Maybe she wasn’t thinking well because she was hungry and tired. Back on the Uffizi side of the river she walked toward Doney’s. But a look in the window at the women gathered in there discouraged her and she crossed the street to the bar at the corner. She had tea and a chicken sandwich and the price was enormous, and she wondered how long she could keep up the pretense that she’d be able to earn enough to live on in Florence even taking into account Alberto’s contribution toward schools, sports and music lessons, vacation trips, and God knows what else.

She took a bus at the Duomo and asked the ticket man to tell her when they came to the stop nearest her hotel. He forgot about her, and when she asked again they were two stops and many turnings past, so that she had to walk back. Once again annulled: Like the ticket man, they all forgot she existed and she was reminded of it over and over again—by Alberto; by her family before him; by the lawyer, who kept asking if she were sure she wanted a divorce, thus showing that he didn’t recognize her as a person with a precise volition; by Dr. Verdile, who couldn’t see her as a woman as well as a white rabbit.