Yet Sabina knew
that far down in her nature there was a mysterious tie of some sort,
an intuition that often told her what her mother would say or do,
though she herself would have spoken and acted otherwise. She had felt
it even with her brother and sister, but she could not feel it at all
with the Baron or his wife. She never could guess what they might do
or say under the most ordinary circumstances, nor what things they
would like and dislike, nor how they would regard anything she said or
did; least of all could she understand why they were so anxious to
keep her with them.
It was all a mystery, but life itself was mysterious, and she was
little more than a child in years though she had never had what one
calls a real childhood.
She often used to sit by her window, the sliding blinds partly drawn
together, but leaving a space through which she could look down at the
city, with a glimpse of Saint Peter's in the distance against the warm
haze of the low Campagna. Rome seemed as far from her then as if she
saw it in a vision a thousand miles away, and the very faint sounds
from the distance were like voices in a dream. Then, if she closed her
eyes a moment, she could see the dark streets about the Palazzo Conti,
and the one open corner of the palace, high up in the sunlight; she
could smell the acrid air that used to come up to her in the early
morning when the panes were opened, damp and laden with odours not
sweet but familiar in the heart of Rome; odours compounded of
cabbages, stables, cheese and mud, and occasionally varied by the
fumes of roasting coffee, or the sour vapours from a wine cart that
was unloading stained casks, all wet with red juice, at the door of
the wine shop far below, a dark little wine shop with a dry bush stuck
out through a smoky little grated window, and a humble sign displaying
the prices of drink in roughly painted blue and red figures.
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