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do not mean sensuous or lacking in modesty. I mean to say that they were proud. Not pure. I often ask myself why it is so hard to be pure today. Don't you think we ought to be more humble?"
    "I believe," I replied, "that you are using the dances of that young American only as an excuse, that perhaps you are thinking of something else."
    "Yes, perhaps I am thinking of something else." She was silent for a while and then repeated, "Don't you think we ought to be more humble?"
    "We ought to have more dignity, more self-respect," I replied. "But perhaps you are right. Only humility can raise us from the humiliation into which we have sunk."
    "Perhaps that is what I meant," said the Princess of Piedmont lowering her head. "We are ill with pride. And pride is not enough to raise us from humiliation. Our actions, our thoughts are not pure." She went on to say that a few months before, when she had Monteverde's Orpheus performed in the Royal Palace at Turin for a small audience of friends and connoisseurs, she had been overtaken at the last moment by a feeling of shame. She had felt as if her intention had not been pure. As if she were only making a proud gesture. I said: "I, too, was at the Royal Palace that day and I felt uneasy; I did not know why. Perhaps, now, in Italy, even Monteverde sounds false. But it is a pity that you should waste your feeling of shame on things that do honor to your taste and intelligence. There are many other things that should cause us all to blush; even you."
    The Princess of Piedmont looked greatly taken aback at my words and I saw that she blushed slightly. I had already regretted having spoken to her in that way. I feared I had offended her. But after a few moments she said to me in a gentle voice that one morning, perhaps tomorrow, she would go to Vence to visit Lawrence's tomb (Lady Chatterley's Lover was much read and talked about in those days), and I spoke of my last visit there. Night had already fallen when I reached Vence. The cemetery was closed; the attendant was asleep and he refused to get up, saying that "cemeteries, at night, are intended for sleep." Pressing my head against the bars of the gate, I endeavored to make out in the silvery moonlight, the simple and humble tomb, and the coarse mosaic of colored pebbles portraying a phoenix, the immortal bird Lawrence wanted to have on his tombstone.
    "Do you think Lawrence was a pure man?" asked the Princess of Piedmont.
    "He was a free man," I replied.
    Later, when she was saying good-by, the Princess said to me in a low voice and a sad tone that surprised me, "Why don't you go back to Italy? Don't take my words as a reproach. It is the advice of a friend."
    I returned to Italy two years later. I was arrested, locked up in a cell at Regina Coeli, and sentenced to five years' imprisonment without a trial. While in prison, I was thinking that the Princess of Piedmont was already a prey to the deep sadness of the Italian people, that she was humiliated by the general slavery, and I was grateful to her for the sad, almost affectionate tone I had detected in her words.
    My last meeting with her occurred some time ago in the station lobby in Naples just after an air raid. The wounded waiting for the ambulances lay on stretchers ranged under the shed. There was anguish in the deathly pale features of the Princess of Piedmont, and not anguish alone, but something deep and secret. She had grown thinner, there were dark circles under her eyes, and there was discernible a white, very faint tattoo of wrinkles on her temples. The pure splendor that had emanated from her when she first came to Turin, a few days after her wedding to Prince Umberto, was quenched by now. Her movements were slower, she had grown more serious, she seemed strangely faded. She recognized me and stopped to greet me, asking from which front I had arrived.
    "From Finland," I replied.
    She looked at me and said: "You will see, all will end well. Our people are marvelous."
    I broke