Unconscious of this, she could still think of forty things besides love. Her chief sentiment in reaching the freedom of the streets was that it would be pleasant to be for several hours away from home, to have a series of cool, empty, palatial rooms all to herself--to practise, yes, but also to read and to look out of the window.
That was her chief sentiment on the fifth of July. By the fifteenth--But it cannot be said that Camilla ever honestly regretted the relative simplicity which she lost that summer.
With all her air of minding her own distinguished affairs, she yet saw everything. She knew by sight the tenants of the house, of course, for whom the Babbo and Olindo, or Aunt Battistina and Bianca, combining forces, agitated the stiff pump-handle. She was familiar with the faces she passed daily on her way. And she naturally remarked, the second time he appeared there, a youth, an idle, slender _damerino_, who seemed waiting for something, on the opposite side of the street. The third time she saw him, she wondered whom he was there for. The breath-catching possibility striking her that he waited to see her come forth--for that style of thing was done in Florence in those days--she gave him his share of an abstracted look, taking in the house fronts and the lamp-post near which he stood. A handsome man, young, the faintest smear of charcoal-dust on his upper lip--seventeen, perhaps. A son of family, quite certainly.
No, he was not there for her sake; he remained watching the door, while pretending not to, after she had passed. For somebody else, then, living in the same house. She had seen him half a dozen times before she could determine whom. One evening she recognized him in the shadowy form hanging about the stairs, once even in the court--her court! She knew all by that time, and scorned him. It was the French maid on the second floor. This person took a child out for the air every morning; she went to the Fortezza, where the little one could play.
And he, a gentleman, could degrade himself to pursue that creature! Parisian, yes, but ugly, and not a day less than twenty-five.
The rather sweet, hungry, expectant, young-dog look of a boy belonging to circles where the maidens are so guarded that if there is to be romance it must be sought where there are greater facilities, mollified her not at all. It disgusted her. It disgusted her to the point finally that, running into him unexpectedly under the archway, she drew herself up and gave him a look in which was expressed all that decent people, _la gente per bene_, think of such bad taste, a prolonged, punishing, proud look; then passed on, her heart thumping with the excitement of the thing.