He asked himself, then, “Am I in love with Edith—whatever this ‘being in love’ means?”
He had never so much as kissed her; only three or four times had he even patted her hand. He felt, sometimes, that behind her reticence there could be an honest passion, uncramped by the desire to make an impression, but he drifted on in a curious contented languor, willing to wait for exaltation. He found that when she was away, he missed her—had every moment some idea or observation he desired to share with her. But that was to him a lesser hint of what Edith Cortright had done to him than his increase in self-confidence.
It took him a time to perceive that perhaps he really was accepted by Edith, by the Ercoles and the various Captain Counts and Professores Dottores whom the Ercoles knew, as something more than the provincial, insensitive, Midwestern manufacturer whom Fran had pitied. Baron Ercole did not explain with bored patience when Sam asked elementary questions about Fascismo. Edith was not tart with him when he grumbled that he did not like the Narcissus in the Naples Museum.
They did not expect him to be an authority on sculpture, Chianti, Roman history, or the ranks of Italian nobility. Apparently they not only expected him to be precisely what he was, but admired him for it. He was at first embarrassed, made rather suspicious, by the Baroness Ercole’s admiration of him as a strong oarsman, a kindly companion, a frank talker, a sound financier, but day by day he saw that she meant it. In this most Italian Italy he might without apology still be a most American American. Light seemed to be woven into the very texture of his face that these months past had been heavy and lifeless and unhealthily flushed; and his eyes flickered as of old they had in talk with his daughter Emily.
“You are real,” they all said, in one way or another, and “I am real!” he began to gloat.
He slept tranquilly, conscious in his sleep of the security of Edith’s presence on the floor below, shielding him against terror. He did not awake now at three, for a cigarette and brooding about Fran.
But once, late at night, he thought that he heard Fran calling, a sharp, beseeching “Sam—oh, Sam!” and he sprang up, stood swaying, bewildered as he realized that she was not with him, probably never would be again.
And the time, which he forgot as soon as possible, when Edith came into the room when he was writing and he raised his head, smiling, with “my Fran!”
Edith’s only effort to correct his provincial ways was in a gentle urging, “Let yourself enjoy life, Sam! You’re typically American in being burdened with a sense of guilt, no matter what you do or you don’t do.”
This may conceivably have had some connection with the fact that when he appeared with Edith, when they went to dinner with one of the Ercoles’ friends or to the Excelsior for tea, more people looked interestedly at him, standing casually beside her, than in the days when he had been anxious to make an impression for Fran’s sake. He no longer minded meeting strangers or having to listen to their foreign accents. He took them as they came.
He awoke one morning to lie looking at the bay and to realize that he was definitely and positively happy.
He had written to Fran a good deal about Edith. Fran was polite in her comments; she sent her greetings to “Mrs. Cortright”; and she was still politer, almost effusively jolly, when she wrote to him from Berlin that she was at last suing for divorce. With the term of residence she already had, the process would take three months. She was very pleasant about the fact that the grounds would be desertion, and the affair free of scandal.
He remembered how excited they had been when they had gone to Chicago together and he had bought her first little string of pearls; how proud she had been of them, and how grateful. … Then he felt curiously free.
When he reluctantly brought this decisive letter to Edith, she read it slowly, and ventured, “Do you mind awfully?”
“Oh yes, a little.”
“But it does clear things up, doesn’t it! And—I hope it won’t break your beautiful new calm!”
“I won’t let it!”
“But I’ve seen you so badgered by her letters!”
“Yes, but—I say! Could you ever possibly consider going to a place like Zenith to live?”
“Of course. Do places differ so much?”
“Would it amuse you to work on a plan like these garden suburbs?”
“I don’t know. It might.”
It was an hour afterward, when they had pretended to keep placidly busy with books and writing letters, that Edith burst out:
“Sam! About your suburbs. Something could be done—not just Italian villas and Swiss chalets—for a town with a tradition of Vermont Yankees and Virginians in buckskin. Why shouldn’t one help to create an authentic and unique American domestic architecture? Our skyscrapers are the first really new thing in architecture since the Gothic cathedral, and perhaps just as beautiful! Create something native—and not be afraid to keep in all the plumbing and
