Ah, the signora was tired!  She smiled pityingly.  Tired!  Not at all, Mary Gowd assured her briskly.  She knew that Tina despised her because she worked like a man.

“Something fine for supper?” Mary Gowd asked mockingly.  Her Italian was like that of the Romans themselves, so soft, so liquid, so perfect.

Tina nodded vigorously, her long earrings shaking.

“Vitello”—­she began, her tongue clinging lovingly to the double l sound—­“Vee-tail-loh—­”

“Ugh!” shuddered Mary Gowd.  That eternal veal and mutton, pinkish, flabby, sickening!

“What then?” demanded the outraged Tina.

Mary Gowd stood up, making gestures, hat in hand.

“Clotted cream, with strawberries,” she said in English, an unknown language, which always roused Tina to fury.  “And a steak—­a real steak of real beef, three inches thick and covered with onions fried in butter.  And creamed chicken, and English hothouse tomatoes, and fresh peaches and little hot rolls, and coffee that isn’t licorice and ink, and—­and—­”

Tina’s dangling earrings disappeared in her shoulders.  Her outspread palms were eloquent.

“Crazy, these English!” said the shoulders and palms.  “Mad!”

Mary Gowd threw her hat on the bed, pushed aside a screen and busied herself with a little alcohol stove.

“I shall prepare an omelet,” she said over her shoulder in Italian.  “Also, I have here bread and wine.”

“Ugh!” granted Tina.

“Ugh, veal!” grunted Mary Gowd.  Then, as Tina’s flapping feet turned away:  “Oh, Tina!  Letters?”

Tina fumbled at the bosom of her gown, thought deeply and drew out a crumpled envelope.  It had been opened and clumsily closed again.  Fifteen years ago Mary Gowd would have raged.  Now she shrugged philosophic shoulders.  Tina stole hairpins, opened letters that she could not hope to decipher, rummaged bureau drawers, rifled cupboards and fingered books; but then, so did most of the other Tinas in Rome.  What use to complain?

Mary Gowd opened the thumb-marked letter, bringing it close to the candlelight.  As she read, a smile appeared.

“Huh!  Gregg,” she said, “Americans!” She glanced again at the hotel letterhead on the stationery—­the best hotel in Naples.  “Americans—­and rich!”

The pleased little smile lingered as she beat the omelet briskly for her supper.

The Henry D. Greggs arrived in Rome on the two o’clock train from Naples.  And all the Roman knights of the waving palm espied them from afar and hailed them with whoops of joy.  The season was still young and the Henry D. Greggs looked like money—­not Italian money, which is reckoned in lire, but American money, which mounts grandly to dollars.  The postcard men in the Piazza delle Terme sped after their motor taxi.  The swarthy brigand, with his wooden box of tawdry souvenirs, marked them as they rode past.  The cripple who lurked behind a pillar in the colonnade threw aside his coat with a practised hitch of his shoulder to reveal the sickeningly maimed arm that was his stock in trade.