(1941) Up at the Villa Read Free Page A

the roadway, the string of cyclists, forced her to give all her attention to
her driving.
    When Mary reached the restaurant, she found that she was
the last to arrive. The Princess San Ferdinando was American; an elderly woman
with iron-grey. tightly waved hair and an authoritative manner, who had lived
in Italy for forty years without ever going back to her native country; her
husband, a Roman prince, had been dead for a quarter of a century and she had
two sons in the Italian Army. She had little money, but a caustic tongue and
great good-nature. Though she could never have been beautiful and now, with her
upright carriage, fine eyes and determined features, was probably
better-looking than she had ever been in her youth, she was reported to have
been very unfaithful to the Prince; but this had not affected the great
position she had made for herself; she knew everybody she wished to know and
everybody was pleased to know her. The rest of the party consisted of a couple
of travelling English people, Colonel and Lady Grace Trail, a sprinkling of
Italians and a young Englishman called Rowley Flint. Mary during her stay in
Florence had got to know him pretty well. He had indeed been paying her a good
deal of attention.
    `I must tell you that rm. only a stopgap; he said when
Mary shook hands with him.
    `It was unusually nice of him,' the Princess put in.
    `I asked him when Sir Edgar called up to say he had to go
to Cannes and he broke another engagement to come to ` You know quite well rd break any engagement in the world to come and dine with you,
Princess,' he said. The Princess smiled dryly.
    `I think I should tell you that he wanted to know exactly
who was going to be here before he accepted!’
    `It's flattering that we met with his approval,' said
Mary. The Princess gave him another of those quiet smiling looks of hers in
which there was the indulgence of an old rip who had neither forgotten nor
repented of her naughty past and at the same time the shrewdness of a woman who
knows the world like the palm of her hand and has come to the conclusion that
no one is any better than he should be.
    `You're an awful scamp, Rowley, and you're not even
good-looking enough to excuse it, but we like you.’ she said.
    It was true that Rowley was not much to look at. He had a
tolerable figure, but he was of no more than average height, and in clothes he
looked thick-set. He had not a single feature that you could call good: he had
white teeth, but they were not very even; he had a fresh colour, but not a very
clear skin; he had a good head of hair, but it was of a vague brown between
dark and fair; his eyes were fairly large, but they were of that pallid blue
that is generally described as grey. He had an air of dissipation and people
who didn't like him said he looked shifty. It was freely admitted, even by his
greatest friends, that he couldn't be trusted. He had a bad record. When he was
only just over twenty he had run away and married a girl who was engaged to
somebody else, and three years afterwards he had been co-respondent in a
divorce case, whereupon his wife divorced him and he had married, not the woman
who had been divorced on his account, but another, only to leave her two or
three years later. He was now just over thirty. He was in short a young man
with a shocking reputation which he thoroughly deserved. You would have said
there was nothing to recommend him; and Colonel Trail, the travelling
Englishman, tall, thin, weather-beaten, with a lean red face, a grey toothbrush
moustache and an air of imbecility, wondered that the Princess had asked him
and his wife to meet a damned rotter like that.
    `I mean he's not the sort of feller' - he would have said
if there'd been anyone to say it to - `that a decent woman ought to be asked to
sit in the same room with.’
    He was glad to see, when they took their places at table,
that though his wife sat next to Rowley Flint, she was