intensely to leave. And he walked still more slowly, furtively, like one who has escaped from prison.
At the corner of the street there was a restaurant. He made for it, and on his way found a tobacco shop, where he bought some cigarettes, picture cards and stamps. Waiting for his steak, he drank big gulps of claret, while he wrote to his parents; to his father: "I have been thinking of you very often today"—it was true enough—and to his mother: "I have already got a small present for you, the first thing I bought here in Rome." Poor mother—how was she? He had often been impatient with her these last years. He unpacked the thing and had a look at it—it was probably meant for a scent-bottle. He added a few words to his mother's card that he managed the language all right, and that to bargain in the shops was an easy matter.
The food was good, but dear. Never mind, once he was more at home here he would soon learn how to live cheaply. Satisfied and exhilarated by the wine, he started to walk in a new direction, past long, low, dilapidated houses, through an archway on to a bridge. A man in a barrier hut stopped him and made him understand that he had to pay a soldo. On the other side of the bridge was a large, dark church with a dome.
He got into a labyrinth of dark, narrow bits of streets—in the mysterious gloom he surmised the existence of old palaces with projecting cornices and lattice windows side by side with miserable hovels, and small church-fronts in between the rows of houses. There were no pavements and he stepped into refuse that lay rotting in the gutter. Outside the narrow doors of the lighted taverns and under the few street lamps he had a vague glimpse of human forms.
He was half delighted, half afraid—boyishly excited, and wondering at the same time how he was to get out of this maze and find the way to his hotel at the ends of the earth—take a cab, he supposed.
