“That you are wicked, that you have a hyena’s heart, that you want to ruin them.”
“Don’t tell them that, because it will make them fall in love with me. A hyena-hearted man is always run after by the ladies.”
“You are right. Come along, go to Naples with me.”
“Is your husband such a terrible bore, little sister?”
“A little more cream and a little less impertinence, bambino,” said Laura, holding out her plate with a comic gesture.
Cæsar burst out laughing, and after lunch he took Laura to the station and remained in Rome alone. His two chief occupations consisted in making love respectfully to the Countess Brenda and going to walk with Preciozi.
The Countess Brenda was manifestly coming around; in the evening Cæsar would take a seat beside her and start a serious conversation about religious and philosophical matters. The Countess was a well-educated and religious woman; but beneath all her culture one could see the ardent dark woman, still young, and with intense eyes.
Cæsar made it a spiritual training to talk to the Countess. She often turned the conversation to questions of love, and discussed them with apparent keenness and insight, but it was evident that all her ideas about love came out of novels. Beyond a doubt, her calm, vulgar husband did not fill up the emptiness of her soul, because the Countess was discontented and had a vague hope that somewhere, above or beneath the commonplaces of the day, there was a mysterious region where the ineffable reigned.
Cæsar, who hadn’t much faith in the ineffable, used to listen to her with a certain amazement, as if the plump, strong woman had been a visionary incapable of understanding reality.
In the daytime Cæsar went walking with Preciozi and they talked of their respective plans.