before me.  At all events, she will take her tongue with her, and ruin herself at her convenience without ruining me.  I wonder what life would be without Mariuccia?  Would anybody darn my stockings, or save the peel of the mandarins to make cordial?  I certainly would not have the mandarins if she were gone—­it is a luxury.  No, I would not have them.  But then, there would be no cordial, and I should have to buy new stockings every year or two.  No, the mandarins cost less than the stockings—­and—­well, I suppose I am fond of Mariuccia.

CHAPTER II

It was really not so long ago—­only one year.  The sirocco was blowing up and down the streets, and about the corners, with its sickening blast, making us all feel like dead people, and hiding away the sun from us.  It is no use trying to do anything when it blows sirocco, at least for us who are born here.  But I had been persuaded to go with Nino to the house of Sor Ercole to hear my boy sing the opera he had last studied, and so I put my cloak over my shoulders, and wrapped its folds over my breast, and covered my mouth, and we went out.  For it was a cold sirocco, bringing showers of tepid rain from the south, and the drops seemed to chill themselves as they fell.  One moment you are in danger of being too cold, and the next minute the perspiration stands on your forehead, and you are oppressed with a moist heat.  Like the prophet, when it blows a real sirocco you feel as if you were poured out like water, and all your bones were out of joint.  Foreigners do not feel it until they have lived with us a few years, but Romans are like dead men when the wind is in that quarter.

I went to the maestro’s house and sat for two hours listening to the singing.  Nino sang very creditably, I thought, but I allow that I was not as attentive as I might have been, for I was chilled and uncomfortable.  Nevertheless, I tried to be very appreciative, and I complimented the boy on the great progress he had made.  When I thought of it, it struck me that I had never heard anybody sing like that before; but still there was something lacking; I thought it sounded a little unreal, and I said to myself that he would get admiration, but never any sympathy.  So clear, so true, so rich it was, but wanting a ring to it, the little thrill that goes to the heart.  He sings very differently now.

Maestro Ercole De Pretis lives in the Via Paola, close to the Ponte Sant’ Angelo, in a most decent little house—­that is, of course, on a floor of a house, as we all do.  But De Pretis is well-to-do, and he has a marble door plate, engraved in black with his name, and two sitting-rooms.  They are not very large rooms, it is true, but in one of them he gives his lessons, and the grand piano fills it up entirely, so that you can only sit on the little black horsehair sofa at the end, and it is very hard to get past the piano on either side.  Ercole is as broad as he is long, and takes snuff when he is not smoking.  But it never hurts his voice.