Before he could persuade himself to go and summon ‘the people,’ so magnificently spoken of, and who consisted of a porter, a kitchen boy, and a housemaid, Signor Giuseppe, flashing one fiery, withering look towards Minna, and with a little bend of the head, as stiff and scornful as his first had been gracious and benignant, had turned on his heel and was gone. She saw his figure disappearing, head erect, shoulders squared, rusty coat-tails flying behind him. But she was too much concerned about the disposition of her luggage to pay much heed to it all. At last everything was safely placed, and she, once in her rooms, did not emerge from them again till Ettore had thumped upon her door with the brief announcement ‘Pronto,’ much past the time at which she had been told dinner was served. When she went into the dining-room, she found her place to be, as before, between Hans Riemann and the German lady, and opposite Signor Giuseppe. She made a general bow to the company as she took her place, and Signor Giuseppe was included in that bow. The merest movement of his head returned her greeting, and as he ostentatiously went out of his way not to speak to her during the entire repast, she decided that he was a very rude person, and a foolish one to boot, since such treatment was not exactly calculated to attract visitors to the house which was under his management. It did not occur to her for a moment to trouble herself, or to feel concerned about it. She conversed with her neighbours on either hand, and saw incidentally that the same pantomime went on between Signor Giuseppe and Ettore which she had observed when she had lunched there a week before. Had she not been an old Roman, and accustomed to Italian ways, she might have found the whole repast a somewhat extraordinary affair, and she noticed that some inexperienced English and American visitors had hard work not to break into loud exclamations over the food which was offered to them, and the profuse use of the toothpick, and the _degagés_ attitudes practised by the Italian part of the company.