They reached their own entrance. Heggen opened the door and struck a match to light her up the endless flight of dark stone steps. Their two small rooms were on the half-landing at the end of the stairs; a small passage outside their doors ended in a marble staircase leading to the flat roof of the house.
At her door she shook hands with him, saying in a low voice:
Gunnar opened the window in his room. The moon shone on an ochre-yellow wall opposite, with closed shutters and black iron balconies. Behind it rose Pincio, with sharply outlined dark masses of foliage against the blue moonlit sky. Below him were old moss-covered roofs, and where the dark shadow of the house ended some washing was hung out to dry on a terrace farther down. He was leaning on the windowsill, disgusted and sad. He was not very particular in general, but to see Jenny in such a state. Ugh! And it was more or less his own fault; she had been so melancholy the first months of her return—like a wounded bird—and to cheer her up a little he had persuaded her to join the party, thinking of course that he and she would amuse themselves by watching the others only, never for a moment suspecting that it would have such an effect on her. He heard her come out from her room and go on to the roof. He hesitated a moment, then followed her.
She was sitting in the only chair, behind the little corrugated-iron summer-house. The pigeons cooed sleepily in the dovecot above.
“Why have you not gone to bed? You will be cold up here.” He fetched her shawl from the summer-house and handed it to her, sitting down between the flower-pots on the top of the wall. They sat quietly staring at the city and the church domes that seemed floating in the moonlit mist. The outlines of distant hills were completely obliterated.
Jenny was smoking. Gunnar lit a cigarette.
“I can hardly stand anything now, it seems—in the way of drink, I mean. It affects me at once,” she said apologetically.
He understood that she was quite herself again.
“I think you might leave it off altogether for a time, and not smoke—at least not so much. You know you have complained of your heart.”
“I know that you agree with me about those people, and I cannot think how you could condescend to associate with them—in the way you did.”