“Beautiful decoration, but very cold,” said Cæsar. “I should prefer rather fewer mottoes and a little more warmth.”
“You are very hard to please,” retorted Laura.
Shortly after getting seated, everybody began to talk from table to table and even from one end of the room to the other. There was none of that classic coolness among the people in the hotel which the English have spread everywhere, along with underdone meat and bottled sauces.
Cæsar devoted himself for the first few moments to ethnology.
“Even from the people you find here, you can see that there is a great diversity of ethnic type in Italy,” he said to Laura. “That blond boy and the Misses San Martino are surely of Saxon origin; the waiter, on the other hand, swarthy like that, is a Berber.”
“Because the blond boy and the San Martines are from the North, and the waiter must be Neapolitan or Sicilian.
“Besides, there is still another type: shown by that dark young woman over there, with the melancholy air. She must be a Celtic type. What is obvious is that there is great liveliness in these people, great elegance in their movements. They are like actors giving a good performance.”
Cæsar’s observations were interrupted by the arrival of a dark, plump woman, who came in from the street, accompanied by her daughter, a blond girl, fat, smiling, and a bit timid.
This lady and Laura bowed with much ceremony.
“Who is she?” asked Cæsar in a low tone.