rgerison
family and Rhoda Johnson left Italy together.

Rhoda was very quiet and still and white. She was terribly alone, for her
mother was gone, and the man she loved was gone, hurriedly, without a
word to her. There remained the Margerisons; Peter, with his friendly
smile and gentle companionableness; Hilary, worried and weary and hardly
noticing her unobtrusive presence; Silvio, Caterina, and Illuminato
sucking gingerbread and tumbling off the rack, and Peggy, on whose broad
shoulder Rhoda suddenly laid her head and wept, all through the Mont
Cenis tunnel.

CHAPTER XI

THE LOSS OF AN IDEA

Peter's room was the smallest and highest in the boarding-house. It was
extremely small and high, and just above the bed was a ceiling that got
hot through and through like a warming-pan, so that the room in summer
was like a little oven below. What air there was came in came through a
small skylight above the wash-stand; through this also came the rain when
it rained; the dirtiest rain Peter had ever seen.

It was not raining this morning, when Peter, after passing a very warm
night, heard the bells beginning. A great many bells begin on Sunday
mornings in this part of London, no doubt in any part of London, but
here they seem particularly loud. The boarding-house was in a small
street close to a large English church and a small Roman church; and the
English church had its first Mass at seven, and the Roman church at six,
and each had another an hour later, and bells rang for all. So Peter lay
and listened.

Sometimes he went with Hilary and Peggy to the Roman Mass. That pleased
Peggy, who had hopes of some day converting him. And occasionally he went
alone to the English Mass, and he liked that better, on the whole,
because the little Roman church was rather ugly. Peter didn't think he
would ever join the Roman church, even to please Peggy. It certainly
seemed to him in some ways the most finely expressive of the churches;
but equally certainly it often expressed the wrong things, and (like
all other churches) left whole worlds unexpressed. And so much of its
expression had a crudity.... It kept saying too little and too much,
and jarring.

Anyhow, this morning Peter, who had a headache after his warm night,
lay and heard the bells and thought what a nice day Sunday was, with
no office to go to. Instead, he would take Rhoda on the river in the
morning, and go and see Lucy in the afternoon, and probably have tea