It was six o’clock of an evening early in March when Mary Gowd went home to the murky little room in the Via Babbuino.  She was too tired to notice the sunset.  She was too tired to smile at the red-eyed baby of the cobbler’s wife, who lived in the rear.  She was too tired to ask Tina for the letters that seldom came.  It had been a particularly trying day, spent with a party of twenty Germans, who had said “Herrlich!” when she showed them the marvels of the Vatican and “Kolossal!” at the grandeur of the Colosseum and, for the rest, had kept their noses buried in their Baedekers.

She groped her way cautiously down the black hall.  Tina had a habit of leaving sundry brushes, pans or babies lying about.  After the warmth of the March sun outdoors the house was cold with that clammy, penetrating, tomblike chill of the Italian home.

“Tina!” she called.

From the rear of the house came a cackle of voices.  Tina was gossiping.  There was no smell of supper in the air.  Mary Gowd shrugged patient shoulders.  Then, before taking off the dowdy hat, before removing the white cotton gloves, she went to the window that overlooked the noisy Via Babbuino, closed the massive wooden shutters, fastened the heavy windows and drew the thick curtains.  Then she stood a moment, eyes shut.  In that little room the roar of Rome was tamed to a dull humming.  Mary Gowd, born and bred amid the green of Northern England, had never become hardened to the maddening noises of the Via Babbuino:  The rattle and clatter of cab wheels; the clack-clack of thousands of iron-shod hoofs; the shrill, high cry of the street venders; the blasts of motor horns that seemed to rend the narrow street; the roar and rumble of the electric trams; the wail of fretful babies; the chatter of gossiping women; and above and through and below it all the cracking of the cabman’s whip—­that sceptre of the Roman cabby, that wand which is one part whip and nine parts crack.  Sometimes it seemed to Mary Gowd that her brain was seared and welted by the pistol-shot reports of those eternal whips.

She came forward now and lighted a candle that stood on the table and another on the dresser.  Their dim light seemed to make dimmer the dark little room.  She looked about with a little shiver.  Then she sank into the chintz-covered chair that was the one bit of England in the sombre chamber.  She took off the dusty black velvet hat, passed a hand over her hair with a gesture that was more tired than tidy, and sat back, her eyes shut, her body inert, her head sagging on her breast.

The voices in the back of the house had ceased.  From the kitchen came the slipslop of Tina’s slovenly feet.  Mary Gowd opened her eyes and sat up very straight as Tina stood in the doorway.  There was nothing picturesque about Tina.  Tina was not one of those olive-tinted, melting-eyed daughters of Italy that one meets in fiction.  Looking at her yellow skin and her wrinkles and her coarse hands, one wondered whether she was fifty, or sixty, or one hundred, as is the way with Italian women of Tina’s class at thirty-five.