"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. She could grind any ordinary male to powder. And why has
she now flitted here, building herself this aerial bower above the old
roofs of Rome? Is she in search of happiness? I doubt whether she will
find it. She possesses that fatal craving - the craving for disinterested
affection, a source of heartache to the perfect egoist for whom
affection of this particular kind is not a necessity but a luxury, and
therefore desirable above all else - desirable, and how seldom attained!
