To the servants San Salvatore seemed asleep. No one came to tea,
nor did the ladies go anywhere to tea. Other tenants in other springs
had been far more active. There had been stir and enterprise; the boat
had been used; excursions had been made; Beppo's fly was ordered;
people from Mezzago came over and spent the day; the house rang with
voices; even sometimes champagne had been drunk. Life was varied, life
was interesting. But this? What was this? The servants were not even
scolded. They were left completely to themselves. They yawned.
Perplexing, too, was the entire absence of gentlemen. How could
gentlemen keep away from so much beauty? For, added up, and even after
the subtraction of the old one, the three younger ladies produced a
formidable total of that which gentlemen usually sought.
Also the evident desire of each lady to spend long hours
separated from the other ladies puzzled the servants. The result was a
deathly stillness in the house, except at meal-times. It might have
been as empty as it had been all the winter, for any sounds of life
there were. The old lady sat in her room, alone; the dark-eyed lady
wandered off alone, loitering, so Domenico told them, who sometimes
came across her in the course of his duties, incomprehensibly among the
rocks; the very beautiful fair lady lay in her low chair in the top
garden, alone; the less, but still beautiful fair lady went up the
hills and stayed up them for hours, alone; and every day the sun blazed
slowly round the house, and disappeared at evening into the sea, and
nothing at all had happened.
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