Chapter XVI
An Italian Mother
There came a day when he took her to see his mother, and Anne prepared for the visit with some anxiety.
“Will she find it hard to forgive me for being a foreigner, and in what dress do you think she would like me best?” she asked.
Gino reassured her by saying that his mother would like her in anything, and that the Romans as a whole did not have the instinctive dislike of strangers that one finds among the French.
When he came to take Mrs. Garrison and her niece to call upon the Italian woman, the older woman was prostrated by a headache, and rather than disappoint his mother, whom he knew to be waiting for them at that very moment in all the state of a dress specially prepared for the occasion, Gino decided to take Anne alone, contrary to the Italian custom.
Anne never forgot that visit. It was her first intimate view of a Roman interior as occupied by a person of moderate income; and the misery of its170
