“This is our house,” he said, getting out and immediately making another attempt to light his cigar.

“May I offer you a cigarette?” asked Orsino, holding out his case.

Contini touched his hat, bowed a little awkwardly and took one of the cigarettes, which he immediately transferred to his coat pocket.

“If you will allow me I will smoke it by and by,” he said.  “I have not finished my cigar.”

Orsino stood on the slippery ground beside the stones and contemplated his purchase.  All at once his heart sank and he felt a profound disgust for everything within the range of his vision.  He was suddenly aware of his own total and hopeless ignorance of everything connected with building, theoretical or practical.  The sight of the stiff, angular scaffoldings, draped with torn straw mattings that flapped fantastically in the south-east wind, the apparent absence of anything like a real house behind them, the blades of grass sprouting abundantly about the foot of each pole and covering the heaps of brown pozzolana earth prepared for making mortar, even the detail of a broken wooden hod before the boarded entrance—­all these things contributed at once to increase his dismay and to fill him with a bitter sense of inevitable failure.  He found nothing to say, as he stood with his hands in his pockets staring at the general desolation, but he understood for the first time why women cry for disappointment.  And moreover, this desolation was his own peculiar property, by deed of purchase, and he could not get rid of it.

Meanwhile Andrea Contini stood beside him, examining the scaffoldings with his bright brown eyes, in no way disconcerted by the prospect.

“Shall we go in?” he asked at last.

“Do unfinished houses always look like this?” inquired Orsino, in a hopeless tone, without noticing his companion’s proposition.

“Not always,” answered Contini cheerfully.  “It depends upon the amount of work that has been done, and upon other things.  Sometimes the foundations sink and the buildings collapse.”

“Are you sure nothing of the kind has happened here?” asked Orsino with increasing anxiety.

“I have been several times to look at it since the baker died and I have not noticed any cracks yet,” answered the architect, whose coolness seemed almost exasperating.

“I suppose you understand these things, Signor Contini?”

Contini laughed, and felt in his pockets for a crumpled paper box of wax-lights.

“It is my profession,” he answered.  “And then, I built this house from the foundations.  If you will come in, Signor Principe, I will show you how solidly the work is done.”