he looked at the floor. And even she,
English housewife as she was, realized the futility of trying to
wash it. As well try to wash the earth itself outside. It was just a
piece of stone-laid earth. She swept it as well as she could, and
made a little order in the faggot-heap in the corner. Then she
washed the little, high-up windows, to try and let in light.

And what was the difference? A dank wet soapy smell, and not much
more. Maria had kept scuffling admiringly in and out, crying her
wonderment and approval. She had most ostentatiously chased out an
obtrusive hen, from this temple of cleanliness. And that was all.

It was hopeless. The same black walls, the same floor, the same cold
from behind, the same green-oak wood-smoke, the same bucket of water
from the well--the same come-and-go of aimless busy men, the same
cackle of wet hens, the same hopeless nothingness.

Alvina stood up against it for a time. And then she caught a bad
cold, and was wretched. Probably it was the wood-smoke. But her
chest was raw, she felt weak and miserable. She could not sit in her
bedroom, for it was too cold. If she sat in the darkness of the
kitchen she was hurt with smoke, and perpetually cold behind her
neck. And Pancrazio rather resented the amount of faggots consumed
for nothing. The only hope would have been in work. But there was
nothing in that house to be done. How could she even sew?

She was to prepare the mid-day and evening meals. But with no pots,
and over a smoking wood fire, what could she prepare? Black and
greasy, she boiled potatoes and fried meat in lard, in a
long-handled frying pan. Then Pancrazio decreed that Maria should
prepare macaroni with the tomato sauce, and thick vegetable soup,
and sometimes polenta. This coarse, heavy food was wearying beyond
words.

Alvina began to feel she would die, in the awful comfortless
meaninglessness of it all. True, sunny days returned and some magic.
But she was weak and feverish with her cold, which would not get
better. So that even in the sunshine the crude comfortlessness and
inferior savagery of the place only repelled her.

The others were depressed when she was unhappy.

"Do you wish you were back in England?" Ciccio asked her, with a
little sardonic bitterness in his voice. She looked at him without
answering. He ducked and went away.

"We will make a fire-place in the other bedroom," said Pancrazio.

No sooner said than done. Ciccio persuaded Alvina to st