It was sirocco in Rome; sirocco which, as every one knows, brings out a damp ooze on the pavement, and makes the hills yet more slippery for the overladen horses and mules; sirocco which disposes man and woman to take peevish views of life, especially if they have no work on which to fasten thought; sirocco, in fine, hot, baleful, depressing, sapping the strength of one and the energy of another, a universal excuse for whatever untoward may befall a Roman on the days when it makes itself felt.
In spite of this languor, however, the young Marchesa di Sant’ Eustachio, and her sister Sylvia Brodrick, were walking briskly along the street which, broken into three names and many hills, stretches the long distance from the end of the Pincio to the foot of Santa Maria Maggiore. There was little likeness between the sisters, in spite of strangers asserting that it was to be found. The marchesa, or Donna Teresa as she preferred to be called—for although no such title, as a title, actually exists, it is given by courtesy to Italian women of rank in place of the ‘signora’—was in mourning, and her face, while intelligent, was not beautiful. But Sylvia’s almost deserved the word. A critical observer might have taken exception to a certain absence of variety, a want of play about the pretty features; that allowed for, the most grudging would have been unable to deny that the features in themselves were charming, and the colouring delightful. Her dress was absolutely neat, though there was nothing in it particularly to admire, and perhaps something inharmonious in the lines.
Donna Teresa was the talker, and as she was in the best of spirits, her talk was eager, and she laughed at small things which would have scarcely amused her unless she held some inward cause for rejoicing. She laughed at the placards on the walls, at the goldfish in their bowls. There was not an old stone built into a wall, not a bright cavern of vegetables, not a chestnut roaster stooping over his rusty tripod and quickening dull embers with fan of turkey feathers, but she noticed, and pointed them out gaily. Sirocco might blow, she cared nothing. For the first time since she became a woman, she was rejoicing in the breeziness of freedom, the bliss of living her own life, of forming plans, and of carrying them out with no one to say her nay.
She had been very young—too young—when she met the marchese at Florence, and, unfortunately, insisted upon marrying him. Three miserable years followed, he being disappointed in two matters, the amount of her fortune, and the recoil which she experienced from his religion. As for her, she was disappointed in everything, and shocked in a great deal, so that when he unexpectedly died, she felt rather relief than grief. Then she blamed herself for the sensation, and in one of the moments of rash remorse to which she was always liable, offered to remain at Florence with the marchesa, his mother. The old lady had been fairly kind to her, and Teresa had a notion that if she had been a more forbearing wife, her husband might have been a better man. Whether the idea were true or mistaken, it haunted her, and gave her two more years, if not of such acute misery, at any rate of a bondage irksome beyond words. The old marchesa had been a power in her youth, and in age ruled her house as once she had ruled society, caring for no visitors except priests, treating Teresa as a lost heretic; untidy, unpunctual, and recognising neither right of solitude nor cultivation of gifts in her daughter-in-law.
How long the girl—for she was still little more in years—would have continued to reproa