II + 

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 medieval street, I’m afraid. That is, it smells. But the rooms are clean.” + 

“Oh, I’m not staying long.⁠ ⁠… We’ll talk later; talk it all out. A thorough talk. When we get in. After a cup of tea.⁠ ⁠…” + 

Mrs. Hilary remembered that Nan did not yet know why she had come. After a cup of strong tea.⁠ ⁠… A cup of tea first.⁠ ⁠… Coffee wasn’t the same. One needed tea, after those awful Germans. She told Nan about these. Nan knew that she would have had tiresome travelling companions; she always did; if it weren’t Germans it would be inconsiderate English. She was unlucky. + 

“Go straight to bed and rest when we get in,” Nan advised; but she shook her head. “We must talk first.” + 

Nan, she thought, looked pinched about the lips, and thin, and her black brows were at times nervous and sullen. Nan did not look happy. Was it guilt, or merely the chill morning air? + 

They stopped at a shabby old house in a narrow medieval street in the Borgo, which had been a palace and was now let in apartments. Here Nan had two bare, gilded, faded rooms. Mrs. Hilary sat by a charcoal stove in one of them, and Nan made her some tea. After the tea Mrs. Hilary felt revived. She wouldn’t go to bed; she felt that the time for the talk had come. She looked round the room for signs of Stephen Lumley, but all the signs she saw were of Nan; Nan’s books, Nan’s proofs strewing the table. Of course that bad man wouldn’t come while she was there. He was no doubt waiting eagerly for her to be gone. Probably they both were.⁠ ⁠… + 