He was a hard-working, hard-reading, rather melancholic man who had never cared much for society and preferred solitude to a club; a fair man, with the face of a student and not over robust, but nevertheless energetic and determined where his duty was concerned. He lived alone in the little house, with his orderly, a clever Sicilian, who cooked for him; a peasant woman from a neighbouring farm-house came every morning to sweep the rooms, make the two beds, and scrub the two stone steps before the door and clean the kitchen.
The house was like hundreds of other little houses in the Campagna. On the ground floor there was a cross-vaulted hall where the Captain transacted business and received the reports of the watch; there was a tiny kitchen also, a stable at the back for two horses, and a narrow chamber adjoining it, in which Pica, the orderly, slept. Upstairs there was only one story, consisting of a large room with a loggia looking across the river towards San Paolo, a bedroom of moderate dimensions, and a dressing-room.
The place was more luxuriously furnished than might have been expected, for though Captain Ugo was not a rich man, he was by no means dependent on his pay. General Severi had lived to retrieve a part of his fortune, and had died rather suddenly of heart-failure after a bad attack of influenza, leaving his property to be divided equally between his two surviving sons and their sister. The latter had married away from Rome, and Ugo's younger brother was in the navy, so that he was now the only member of his family left in Rome.
He was a man of taste and reading, who had entered the army to please his father and would have left it on the latter's death if he had not been persuaded by his superiors that he had a brilliant career before him and might be a general at fifty, if he stuck to the service. He had answered that he would do so if he might have some post of trust in which he would have time for study; the command of the magazine at Monteverde was vacant just then, and as no more influential person wanted to live in such a dull place, he got it.
Yet his house was not much more than a mile from the gate, by a good high-road; whence it is clear that his solitude was a matter of choice and not of necessity. He had few friends, however, and none who showed any inclination to come and see him, though his acquaintances were numerous; for he had been rather popular in society when a young subaltern, and had been welcome wherever his elder brother Giovanni took him.