Very unwillingly Ettore began his search all over again, and Giuseppe, furious with his slowness, cast aside the list, and with his nervous fingers turned over the things and began to help him. Minna was sorely embarrassed. This was her only way of exit. She must either steal back to her room and give up her party--for this was a business which would not be over in five minutes--or she must brave the worst, walk through the room, and take what came. ‘What a simpleton I am!’ she told herself. ‘I may turn my whole life upside down if I am to be always thinking of things like this. I will go straight through to the hall.’ She advanced with a faint hope of being able to slip unobserved past the busy Signor Giuseppe--a vain aspiration. Whether he heard her step or felt her presence, who shall say? He turned sharp upon her just as she had come up to where he was, and stood there, looking angry and excited, with a red colour in his cheeks. It was impossible to quite ignore the situation--at least, for Minna it was. She forced an embarrassed smile, and observed: ‘I see you are very busy.’ ‘Yes,’ replied Signor Giuseppe with a horrid sneering laugh, as he eyed her over from head to foot, ‘I am. This is my daily work. Yours, I see, permits of more elegant arrangements in every way.’ He bowed to her deeply, mockingly, and as she still hesitated, he added in the same nasal sneering tone: ‘Gentilissima signora, pardon me if I remind you that the time of the working man is precious, and our business unfortunately takes up a good deal of room.’ She found absolutely nothing to say in reply to this. She saw how angry he was. The veins on his forehead swelled, his eyes flashed, his fingers worked. With a bow and a troubled look she passed out of the room and into the hall. Seated in a little open carriage into which she had stepped, and driving towards Mrs. Charrington’s house, she found she was shaking with excitement, vexed and perturbed to her inmost being. ‘I shall have to leave this place,’ she told herself. ‘It is an impossible situation, and cannot continue. I am not going to have my comfort ruined by a touchy man who chooses to set some perfectly imaginary value on my opinion, and who is himself nothing to me--less than nothing to me. I must go. What an unlucky moment that was in which Signora Vincenzini came to me to tell me she was leaving Rome! I felt at the time that it was the beginning of troubles, and so it was.’ She looked straight before her as they drove to one of the most fashionable streets in a new quarter of the Quirinal, where her friend lived. On setting off she had felt very angry with Signor Giuseppe for annoying her by his evident vexation every time she saw him in a position derogatory to his dignity.