As I said, she lived a long way from the Gran Reale. I had plenty of time for my flare-up, and for brooding, and for getting over it. But we never did get around to much idle conversation on that little trip. By the time I had simmered down, I began to have disturbing thoughts. It suddenly occurred to me that I was a man, and she was a girl, and we were riding in a cab. I don't know how else to say it. At one moment I was taking her home from a dinner; and at the next, I was taking her home from a date. Nothing had changed--except the way I looked at it. * * * * * All of a sudden, I began to feel as though I were fourteen years old again. It had been quite a long time since I had had the duty of escorting a beautiful girl--and by then I realized this was a really _beautiful_ girl--home at the end of an evening. And I was faced with the question that I had thought would never bother me again at least a decade before. Should I kiss her good night? It was a problem, and I thought about it, feeling a little foolish but rather happy about it. But all my thinking came to nothing. She decided for me. The cab stopped in front of a white stucco wall. Like so many of the better Italian homes, the wall enclosed a garden, and the house was in the middle of the garden. It was an attractive enough place--Class A at least, I thought--though it was hard to tell in the moonlight. I cleared my throat and sort of halfway leaned over to her. Then she turned and was looking up at me, and the moonlight glinted brightly off what could only have been tears in her eyes. I stared. She didn't say a word. She shook her head briefly, opened the door and was gone behind the gate. It was a puzzlement. Why had she been crying? What had I done? I reviewed my conduct all the way back to the hotel, but nothing much came of it. Perhaps I had been brusque--but brusque enough to bring tears? I couldn't believe it. Curious new life! I fell asleep with the pale moon shining in the window, brooding about the life I was just beginning, and about the old life behind me that was buried in the same grave with Marianna. II The Naples branch of the Company lay in the heart of the city. I took a cab to a sort of dome-roofed thing called a _galleria_, and walked under its skeletal steel ceiling to my new office. Once the _galleria_ had been roofed with glass, but the glass had powdered down from the concussion of the Mt. Vesuvius bomb, or the Capodichino bomb, or one of the other hammerblows the Sicilians had rained on the principality of Naples in the recent unpleasantness. I entered the office and looked around. The blonde girl named Susan appeared to double as the office receptionist. She nodded efficiently and waved me to a fenced-off enclosure where Sam Gogarty sat, plump and untroubled, at an enormous desk. I pushed open the swinging gate. Gogarty looked at me icily. "You're late," he said.