XXIII
Until one o’clock Baby Warren lay in bed, reading one of Marion Crawford’s curiously inanimate Roman stories; then she went to a window and looked down into the street. Across from the hotel two carabinieri, grotesque in swaddling capes and harlequin hats, swung voluminously from this side and that, like mains’ll coming about, and watching them she thought of the guards’ officer who had stared at her so intensely at lunch. He had possessed the arrogance of a tall member of a short race, with no obligation save to be tall. Had he come up to her and said: ‘Let’s go along, you and I,’ she would have answered: ‘Why not?’ at least it seemed so now, for she was still disembodied by an unfamiliar background.
Her thoughts drifted back slowly through the guardsman to the two carabinieri, to
