When she awoke in the morning she told herself that he would very likely not come at all, and so much the better—but when he knocked at her door she was pleased all the same. “I have had nothing to eat yet, Miss Winge. Could you give me a cup of tea and some bread?”
Jenny looked about her in the room.
“Yes, but the room isn’t done yet.”
“I’ll shut my eyes while you lead me on to the balcony,” said Gram from behind the door. “I am dying for a cup of tea.”
“Very well, half a minute.” Jenny covered her bed with the counterpane, tidied the dressing-table, and changed her dressing-jacket for a long kimono. “Come in, and please go and sit on the balcony while I get your tea.” She brought out a stool and placed some bread and cheese on it.
Gram looked at her bare, white arms in the long, fluttering sleeves of the dark blue kimono with a pattern of yellow and purple iris.
“What a pretty thing you have on. It looks like a real geisha dress.”
“It is real. Cesca and I bought these in Paris to wear at home in the morning.”
“It is a capital idea, I think, to go about like that and look pretty when you are alone. I like it.”
He lit a cigarette and gazed at the smoke as it rose in the air.
“Ugh! At home the maid and my mother and sister used to look like anything in the morning. Don’t you think women ought always to make themselves look as pretty as possible?”
“Yes, but it isn’t always possible when you have to do housework.”
[99]
“Perhaps not, but they might at least do their hair before breakfast and put on a thing like that, don’t you think?”
He was just in time to save a cup, which she was on the point of brushing down with her sleeve.
“You see how practical it is. Now, drink your tea; you said you were thirsty.”
She discovered suddenly that Cesca’s whole stock of coloured stockings were hanging to dry on the balcony, and she removed them a little nervously.
While he was having his tea he explained:
“I lay awake last night thinking, almost until dawn, and then, of course, I overslept, so had no time to stop at the latteria on my way. I think we should go to Via Cassia to that anemone place of yours.”
“Anemone place.” Jenny laughed. “When you were a boy did you, too, have special places for violets and bluebells, and kept them a secret from the others and went there all alone every year?”
“Of course I had. I know a beech grove by the old road to Holmenkollen, where there are real scented violets.”
“I know it too,” she interrupted triumphantly, “to the right, just before the road branches off to Sorkedal.”
“Exactly. I had some other places too, on Fredriksborg and——”
“I must go in and put on my dress,” said Jenny.
“Put on the one you had yesterday, please!” he called after her.
“It will get so dusty”—but she changed her mind in the same moment. Why should she not make herself look nice? The old black silk had been her best for a good many years; she need not treat it with such deference any more.
“I don’t care! but it fastens at the back, and Cesca’s not in.”
“Come out here and I’ll button it for you. I am an expert at it. It seems to me I have done nothing all my[100] life but fasten mother’s and Sophy’s buttons at the back.”
She could manage all but two, and she allowed Gram to help her with them. As she stood by him in the sunshine while he fastened her dress, he became aware of the faint, mild fragrance of her hair and her body. He noticed one or two small rents in the silk, which were carefully darned, and the sight of it filled his heart with an infinite tenderness towards her.
“Do you think Helge a nice name?” he asked, when they were having lunch at an osteria far out on the Campagna.
“Yes; I like it.”
“Do you know that it is my Christian name?”
“Yes; I saw you had written it in the visitors’ book at the club.” She blushed slightly, thinking he might believe that she had looked it up on purpose.
“I suppose it is nice. On the whole, there are few names that are nice or ugly in themselves; it all depends if you like the people or not. When I was a boy we had a nurse called Jenny; I could not bear her, and ever since I thought the name was hideous and common. It seemed to me preposterous that you should be called Jenny, but now I think it so pretty; it gives one an idea of fairness. Can you not hear how delicately fair it sounds?—Jenny—a dark woman could not be called that, not Miss Jahrman, for instance. Francesca suits her capitally, don’t you think? It sounds so capricious, but Jenny is nice and bright.”
“It is a name we’ve always had in my father’s family,” she said, by way of an answer.
“What do you think of Rebecca, for instance?”
“I don’t know. Rather harsh and clattering, perhaps, but it is pretty, though.”
“My mother’s name is Rebecca,” said Helge. “I think it sounds hard, too. My sister’s name is Sophy. She married[101] only to get away from home, I am sure, and have a place of her own. I wonder mother could be so delighted to get her married, considering the cat-and-dog life she herself has led with my father. But there was no end of a fuss about the Rev. Arnesen, when my sister got engaged to him. I can’t stand my brother-in-law, neither can father, I believe, but mother!...
“My fiancée—I was engaged once, you know—her name was Catherine, but she was always called Titti. I saw she had that name put into the papers, too, when her marriage was announced.
“It was a stupid thing altogether. It was three years ago. She was giving some lessons in the school where I was teaching. She was not a bit pretty, but she flirted with everybody, and no woman had ever taken any notice of me—which you can easily understand, when you think of me as I was here at first. She always laughed at everything—she was only nineteen. Heaven knows why she took to me.
“I was jealous, and it amused her. The more jealous she............