In the evening she wrote to Gert Gram a long, sad and tender letter bidding him farewell for ever.
On the following day she took a through ticket to Florence; after a sleepless night in the train she found herself sitting at the window at daybreak. Wild torrents spurted down the forest-clad mountain-sides. It grew lighter and lighter, and the towns became more and more Italian in character: rust-brown or golden-yellow tiles, loggias to the houses, green shutters against reddish stone walls, church fronts in baroque, stone bridges across the rivers, vineyards outside the towns, and grey castle ruins on the hilltops. At the stations all the signs were written in German and Italian.
She stood in the customs office looking at the first- and second-class passengers startled out of their sleep, and she felt quite happy without being able to account for it. She was back again in Italy. The customs officer smiled at her because she was so fair, and she smiled back; evidently he took her for the maid of one or other of the lady passengers.
The misty grey mountains ridges on either side had a bluish shade in the crevices, the ground looked rusty red, and the sun flamed white and hot.
But in Florence it was bitterly cold in the early days of November. Tired and frozen, she stayed in the city a fortnight—her heart cold to all the beauty around her, and melancholy and discouraged because it did not warm her as before.
One morning she went to Rome. The ground was white with frost all the way down through Toscana; in the middle of the day the frosty mist lifted and the sun shone—and she saw again a spot she had never forgotten: the lake of Trasimene lying pale blue, surrounded by the mountains. A point of land projected into the water, with towers and pinnacles of a small stone-grey town, with a cypress avenue leading from the station.
She arrived at Rome in pouring rain. Gunnar was on the platform to meet her, and he squeezed her hands as he wished her welcome. He went on talking and laughing all the time as they drove from the station to the quarters he had engaged for her, the rain splashing against the cab from the grey sky and from the street paving.
Heggen was sitting at the outer side of the marble table, taking no part in the conversation; now and then he cast a glance at Jenny, who sat pressed into the corner, with a whisky and soda before her. She was chatting very merrily with a young Swedish lady across the table, without taking the slightest notice of her neighbours, Dr. Broager and the little Danish artist Loulou Schulin, who both tried to draw her attention. Heggen saw that she had had too much to drink again. A company of Scandinavians and a couple of Germans had met in a wine shop, and were finishing the night in the inmost corner of a somewhat dingy café. They were all of them more or less affected by what they had drunk, and very much opposed to the request of the landlord that they should leave, as it was past time for locking up and he would be fined two hundred lire.