“I know it, my dear. I said it for a joke. You make rough jokes sometimes too, you know.”
“I’ll look all right. That is if you have a tailor here who can cut clothes.”
“There isn’t one here, but there is in Rome. Can we drive together to Rome to get the clothes?”
“Yes. And we will live outside the town at Viterbo and only go in for the fittings and for dinner in the evening. Then we’ll drive back in the night.”
“Will we see cinema people and speak about them with candour and perhaps not have a drink with them?”
“We’ll see them by the thousands.”
“Will we see them being married for the second and third time and then being blessed by the Pope?”
“If you go in for that kind of thing.”
“I don’t,” the girl said. “That’s one reason that I cannot marry you.”
“I see,” the Colonel said. “Thank you.”
“But I will love you, whatever that means, and you and I know what it means very well, as long as either of us is alive and after.”
“I don’t think you can love very much after you, yourself, are dead,” the Colonel said.
He started to eat the artichoke, taking a leaf at a time, and dipping them, heavy side down, into the deep saucer of sauce vinaigrette.
“I don’t know whether you can either,” the girl said. “But I will try. Don’t you feel better to be loved?”
“Yes,” the Colonel said. “I feel as though I were out on
