dreary, impenetrable grey of foggy air. Although the room was warm and there was a good fire burning in the grate, she clasped her arms together as she looked, and shivered a little.
“Wretched weather, isn’t it?” she said in her crisp tones, her gaunt weathered face and toothy mouth touched by the faint fixed grin as she looked out with her bright hard stare. “Don’t you find it frightfully depressing? Most Americans do,” she said, getting a sharp disquieting sound into the word.
“Yes. I do, a little. We don’t have this kind of weather very often. But this is the time of year you get it here, isn’t it? I suppose you’re used to it by now?”
“Used to it?” she said crisply, turning her gaze upon him. “Not at all. I’ve known it all my life, but I’ll never get used to it. It is a wretched climate.”
“Still, you wouldn’t feel at home anywhere else, would you? You wouldn’t want to live outside of England?”
“No?” she said, staring at him with the faint set grin around her toothy mouth. “Why do you think so?”
“Because your home is here.”
“My home? My home is where they have fine days and where the sun is always shining.”
“I wouldn’t like that. I’d get tired of sunlight all the time. I’d want some grey days and some fog and snow.”
“Yes, I suppose you would. But then, you’ve been used to having fine days all your life, haven’t you? With us, it’s different. I’m so fed up with fog and rain that I could do without them nicely, thank you, if I never saw them again…. I don’t think you could ever understand how much the sunlight means to us,” she said slowly. She turned, and for a moment looked out of the window. “Sunlight—warmth—fine days for ever! Warmth everywhere—in the earth, the sky, in the lives of the people all around you, nothing but warmth and sunlight and fine days!”
“And where would you go to find all that? Does it exist?”
“Oh, of course!” she said crisply and good-naturedly, turning to him again. “There’s only one place to live—only one country where I want to live.”
“Where is that?”
“Italy,” she said. “That’s my real home…. I’d live the rest of my life there if I could.” For a moment longer she looked out of the window, then turned briskly, saying:
