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Rossetti.

“Vanna! Oh, Vanna! Tell me when the horses arrive!”

Tony was calling down the stone stairs of the Roman palazzo of which he inhabited a third-floor room. It was a very old palazzo, grim and draughty and cheap, and Tony’s room had a lofty painted ceiling covered with fat, creamy nymphs and very pink cupids, but the furniture was sketchy in the extreme. He had been there for about three weeks, and liked it.

The small, quick cameriera replied, “mit a harp-like melodious twang,” that she would “suddenly” let the Signorino know, and Tony returned to the peaceful enjoyment of his cigarette. Paolo was not due for some minutes, and he was never as punctual as his military training might lead one to expect.

Tony could not have explained very coherently how he came to be such friends with this young lieutenant of artillery and his circle; it began with a restive horse in the Pincio one morning, and went on quickly; he seemed to fit in with uncanny ease. When his Italian failed him he took to French, because they all spoke it, and they hardly thought of him as a foreigner. But neither did they look on him as an Italian; he was “an extra,” Paolo Guittoni said.