I have interrupted a game, and at once begin to
feel de trop under a glance from those smouldering grey eyes.
"It is not a trifle. It is a matter of life and death. Will you please
listen for half a minute? Then I will evaporate, and you can go on with
your ridiculous cards. The fact is, I am being assassinated by inches.
Do you know of a place where a man can get eatable macaroni nowadays?
The old kind, I mean, made out of pre-war-time flour...."
She lays her hand on the cards as though to suspend the game, and asks
the girl in Italian:
"What was the name of that place?"
"That place----"
"Oh, stupid! Where I stayed with Miranda last September. Where I tore my
skirt on the rock. Where I said something nice about the white
macaroni?"
"Soriano in Cimino."
"Soriano," echoes the mistress in a cloud of smoke. "There is a tram
from here every morning. They can put you up."
A pause follows. I would like to linger and talk to this sultry and
self-centred being; I would like to wander with her through these rooms,
imbibing their strange Oriental spirit--not your vulgar Orient, but
something classic and remote; something that savours, for aught I know,
of Indo-China, where Mrs. Nichol, in one of her immature efforts at
self-realisation, spent a few years as the wife of a high French
official, ere marrying, that is, the late lamented Nichol--another
unsuccessful venture.
Now why did she marry all these people (for I fancy there was yet an
earlier alliance of some kind)? A whim, a freak? Or did they plague her
into it? If so, I suspect they lived and died to repent their manly
persistence.
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