Full resolution (JPEG) - On this page / på denna sida - Part one - VII
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Jenny. “Can you understand it — for I don’t — that I still
care for that cad of a man? Hans had not mentioned my
name, though, and he did not imagine, of course, that Hjerrild
would meet me or know me from the photograph; it was taken
when I was eighteen.”
Jenny’s birthday was on the seventeenth of January. She and
Francesca were having a dinner-party in the Campagna, in a
small osteria in the Via Appia Nuova. Ahlin, Heggen, Gram,
and Miss Palm, the Danish nurse, made up the party.
From the tram terminus they walked two and two along the
sunny, white road. Spring was in the air, the brown Campagna
had a greyish-green tinge; the daisies, which had been
blossoming more or less all the winter, began to spread all over in
silvery spots, and the impatient clusters of tender green shoots
on the elder bushes along the fences had grown.
The larks hung trembling high up in the blue-white sky,
and there was a haze over the city and the ugly, red blocks of
houses it had sprinkled over the plain. Beyond the massive
arches of the canal, the Alban mountains, with small white
villages, showed faintly through the mist.
Jenny walked in front with Gram, who carried her grey dust-coat.
She was radiantly beautiful in a black silk dress; he had
never seen her in anything but her grey dress or coat and skirt.
It seemed to him almost as if he walked with a new and strange
woman. Her waist was so small in the shiny black material
that her form above it seemed round and supple; the bodice
was cut open in a deep square in front, and her hair and skin
were dazzlingly fair. She wore a big black hat, in which he
had seen her before, but without specially noticing it. Even
her pink beads looked quite different with the black dress.
They ate out of doors in the sunshine under the vine, which
threw a shadow in the form of a fine bluish net over
the tablecloth. Miss Palm and Heggen wanted to decorate
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