The German mother broke out in angry remonstrance, indicating that she had neuralgia and the backfisch a cold in the head.  There followed one of those quarrels which occur on this topic in trains, and are so bitter and devastating.  It had now more than the pre-war bitterness; between the combatants flowed rivers of blood; behind them ranked male relatives killed or maimed by the male relatives of their foes on the opposite seat.  The English ladies won.  Germany was a conquered race, and knew it.  In revenge, the backfisch coughed and sneezed “all over the carriage,” as Mrs. Hilary put it, “in the disgusting German way,” and her mother made noises as if she could be sick if she tried hard enough.

So it was a detestable journey.  And the second night in the train was worse than the first.  For the Germans, would you believe it, shut both windows while the English were asleep, and the English, true to their caste and race, woke with bad headaches.

2

When they got to Rome in the morning Mrs. Hilary felt thoroughly ill.  She had to strive hard for self-control; it would not do to meet Nan in an unnerved, collapsed state.  All her psychical strength was necessary to deal with Nan.  So when she stood on the platform with her luggage she looked and felt not only like one who has slept (but not much) in a train for two nights and fought with Germans about windows but also like an elderly virgin martyr (spiritually tense and strung-up, and distraught, and on the line between exultation and hysteria).

Nan was there.  Nan, pale and pinched, and looking plain in the nipping morning air, though wrapped in a fur coat. (One of the points about Nan was that, though she sometimes looked plain, she never looked dowdy; there was always a distinction, a chic, about her.)

Nan kissed her mother and helped with the luggage and got a cab.  Nan was good at railway stations and such places.  Mrs. Hilary was not.

They drove out into the hideous new streets.  Mrs. Hilary shivered.

“Oh, how ugly!”

“Rome is ugly, this part.”

“It’s worse since ’99.”

But she did not really remember clearly how it had looked in ’99.  The old desire to pose, to show that she knew something, took her.  Yet she felt that Nan, who knew that she knew next to nothing, would not be deceived.

“Oh ... the Forum!”

“The Forum of Trajan,” Nan said.  “We don’t pass the Roman Forum on the way to our street.”

“The Forum of Trajan, of course, I meant that.”

But she knew that Nan knew she had meant the Forum Romanum.

“Rome is always Rome,” she said, which was safer than identifying particular buildings, or even Forums, in it.  “Nothing like it anywhere.”

“How long can you stay, mother?  I’ve got you a room in the house I’m lodging in.  It’s in a little street the other side of the Corso.  Rather a mediaeval street, I’m afraid.  That is, it smells.  But the rooms are clean.”