y time turn his
tenant out. Corbario thought of everything. Twice a week a gardener
came, early in the morning, and soon the garden was really pretty; and
the respectable woman-servant watered the flowers every evening just
before sunset. There was a comfortable Calcutta chair for Marcello in a
shady corner, the very first time he came there, and Regina had learned
how to make tea for him; for the respectable woman-servant knew how to
do all sorts of things belonging to civilised life. She was so intensely
respectable and quiet that Marcello was almost afraid of her, until it
occurred to him that as she took so much trouble, he ought to give her a
present of money; and when he had done this twice, he somehow became
aware that she was his devoted slave--middle-aged and excessively
respectable. Folco was really a very good judge of character, Marcello
thought, since he could at once pick out such a person from the great
horde of the unemployed.

Her name was Settimia, and it was wonderful to see how she quietly
transformed Regina into a civilised creature, who must attract attention
by her beauty and carriage, but who might have belonged to a
middle-class Roman family so far as manners and dress were concerned. It
is true that the girl possessed by nature the innate dignity of the
Roman peasant, with such a figure and such grace as any aristocrat might
have envied, and that she spoke with the Roman accent which almost all
other Italians admire; but though her manners had a certain repose, they
were often of an extremely unexpected nature, and she had an
astonishingly simple way of calling things by their names which
sometimes disconcerted Marcello and sometimes amused him. Settimia
civilised her, almost without letting her know it, for she was quick to
learn, like all naturally clever people who have had no education, and
she was imitative, as all womanly women are when they are obliged to
adapt themselves quickly to new surroundings. She was stimulated, too,
by the wish to appear well before Marcello, lest he should ever be
ashamed of her. That was all. She never had the least illusion about
herself, nor any hope of raising herself to his social level. She was
far too much the real peasant girl for that, the descendant of thirty or
more generations of serfs, the offspring of men and women who had felt
that they belonged body and soul to the feudal lord of the land on which
they were born, and had never been disturbed by