In the meantime Alice found herself mistress of the position. Humble little woman as she was, there came by moments, even to her, a compassionate contempt for the male creatures who got hungry and sulky after this fashion, and could only sit down ill-tempered and disconsolate before the fire. Alice for her part sent off Maria to the trattoria, and cheerfully prepared to feed the creatures who did not know how to set about it for themselves. When she had done her utmost, however, there was still a look of dismay on Colin’s face. The dinner from the trattoria was a thing altogether foreign to the experiences of the two Scotchmen. They suspected it while they ate, making secret wry faces to each other across the equivocal board. This was the land of poets into which they had come--the land of the ideal, where, according to their inexperienced imagination, everything was to share the general refinement! But, alas, there was nothing refined about the dinner from the trattoria, which was altogether a native production, and with which the Merediths, being accustomed, and knowing what they had to expect, contented themselves well enough. When Lauderdale and his charge retired, chilled to the bone, to their stony, chilly bedrooms, where everything seemed to convey not warmth but a sensation of freezing, they looked at each other with amazement and disgust on their faces. “Callant, you would have been twenty times better at home,” said Lauderdale with a remorseful groan; “and as for thae poor innocents, who have nobody to look after them--But they kent what they were coming to,” he continued, with a flash of momentary anger. Altogether it was as unsuccessful a beginning as could well be imagined of the ideal poetic Italian life. CHAPTER XXX.