She turned and went in search of him, making her way with difficulty through the piles of boxes.  What could be in them all?  Edmund must have been buying for years.  Every now and then as she stooped to look at the labels pasted upon them, she caught names well known to her.  Orbatelli, Via dei Bardi 13, Firenze; Bianchi, Via Mazzini 12, Lucca; Fratelli Masai, Via Manzoni, Pisa.  And everywhere the recurrent word—­Antichita.

How she hated the word!—­how she hated the associations linked with it, and with the names on the boxes.  They were bound up with a score of humbling memories, the memories of her shabby, struggling youth.  She thought of her father—­the needy English artist, Robert Smeath, with just a streak, and no more than a streak, of talent, who had become rapidly “Italianate” in the Elizabethan sense—­had dropped, that is, the English virtues, without ever acquiring the Italian.  He had married her mother, a Florentine girl, the daughter of a small impiegato living in one of the dismal new streets leading out of Florence on the east, and had then pursued a shifting course between the two worlds, the English and the Italian, ordering his household and bringing up his children in Italian fashion, while he was earning his keep and theirs, not at all by the showy pictures in his studio which no one would buy, but as jackal in antichita, to the richer English and American tourists.  He kept a greedy eye on the artistic possessions still remaining in the hands of impoverished native owners; he knew the exact moment of debt and difficulty in which to bring a foreign gold to bear; he was an adept in all the arts by which officials are bribed, and pictures are smuggled.  And sometimes these accomplishments of his resulted in large accessions of cash, so that all the family lived on the fat of the land, bought gorgeous attire, and went to Livorno, or Viareggio, or the Adriatic coast, for the summer.  And sometimes there was no luck, and therefore no money.  Owners became unkindly patriotic and would not sell.  Or some promising buyer, after nibbling for months, went off finally unhooked.  Then the apartment in the Via Giugno showed the stress of hard times.  The girls wore their old clothes to rags; the mother did all the work of the house in a bedgown and slippers; and the door of the apartment was never opened more than a few inches to any applicant, lest creditors should get in.

And the golden intervals got fewer, and the poverty more persistent, as the years went on.  Till at last, by the providence—­or malice—­of the gods, a rich and apparently prodigal Englishman, Edmund Melrose, hungry for antichita of all sorts, arrived on the scene.  Smeath became rapidly the bond-slave of Melrose, in the matter of works of art.  The two made endless expeditions together to small provincial towns, to remote villas in the Apuan or Pisan Alps, to palazzi in Verona, or Lucca, or Siena.  Melrose indeed had not been