He could see her walking through the Gallery at Doctor Moreno’s side:  a blonde beauty, svelte, somewhat thin, over-grown, taller than her years, gazing with astonishment through those large green eyes of hers at the cold, bustling city, so different from the warm orchards of her childhood home; the father, bearded, wrinkled, nervous, still irritated at the ruin of his Republican hopes; a veritable ogre to strangers who did not know his lamb-like gentleness.  Like exiles who had found a refuge in art, they two went their way through that life of emptiness, of void, a world of greedy teachers anxious to prolong the period of study, and of singers incapable of speaking kindly even of themselves.

They lived on a fourth floor on the Via Passarella—­a narrow, gloomy thoroughfare with high houses, like the streets of old Alcira, preempted by music publishers, theatrical agencies and retired artists.  Their janitor was a former chorus leader; the main floor was rented by an agency exclusively engaged from sun to sun in testing voices.  The others were occupied by singers who began their vocal exercises the moment they got out of bed, setting the house ringing like a huge music-box from roof to cellar.  The Doctor and his daughter had two rooms in the house of Signora Isabella, a former ballet-dancer who had achieved notorious “triumphs” in the principal courts of Europe, but was now a skeleton wrapped in wrinkled skin, groping her way through the corridors, quarreling over money in foul-mouthed language with the servants, and with no other vestiges of her past than the gowns of rustling silk, and the diamonds, emeralds and pearls that took their turns in her stiff, shrivelled ears.  This harpy had loved Leonora with the fondness of the veteran for the new recruit.

Every day Doctor Moreno went to a cafe of the Gallery, where he would meet a group of old musicians who had fought under Garibaldi, and young men who wrote libretti for the stage, and articles for Republican and Socialist newspapers.  That was his world:  the only thing that helped him endure his stay in Milan.  After a lonely life back there in his native land, this corner of the smoke-filled cafe seemed like Paradise to him.  There, in a labored Italian, sprinkled with Spanish interjections, he could talk of Beethoven and of the hero of Marsala; and for hour after hour he would sit wrapt in ecstasy, gazing, through the dense atmosphere, at the red shirt and the blond, grayish locks of the great Giuseppe, while his comrades told stories of this, the most romantic, of adventurers.

During such absences of her father, Leonora would remain in charge of Signora Isabella; and bashful, shrinking, half bewildered, would spend the day in the salon of the former ballet-dancer, with its coterie of the latter’s friends, also ruins surviving from the past, burned-out “flames” of great personages long since dead.  And these witches, smoking their cigarettes, and looking their jewels over every other moment to be sure they had not been stolen, would size up “the little girl,” as they called her, to conclude that she would “go very far” if she learned how to “play the game.”