Nancy was lost at first in the _pensione_ to which Kenrick had entrusted her. The bareness of it seemed to reflect the bareness of her own mind amid the unmeaning sounds of a strange tongue. During the first week she felt that she should never, stayed she in Naples for years, acquire a single word of Italian, and the week after she was convinced that she should never be able to say anything more than the Italian for “yes,” “no,” “please,” “thanks,” “good night,” “good morning,” and “bread.” For a fortnight she was so completely stunned by the swarming rackety city that she spent all her spare time in the aquarium, contemplating the sea-anemones. The stories of great singers with which Signor Arcucci was to have entertained her leisure seemed indefinitely postponed at her present rate of progress with Italian. She should have to become proficient indeed to follow the rapid hoarseness of that faded voice. Meanwhile, she must wrestle with an unreasonable upside down language in which _aqua calda_ meant hot water and not, as one might suppose, cold. Nancy cursed her lack of education a hundred times a day, and an equal number of times she thanked Heaven that Letizia already knew twenty-two Italian words and could say the present indicative of the verb “to be.” Signora Arcucci was a plump waxen-faced Neapolitan housewife who followed the English tradition of supposing that a foreigner would understand her more easily if she shouted everything she had to say about four times as loud as she spoke ordinarily. She used to heap up Nancy’s plate with spaghetti; and, as Nancy could not politely excuse herself from eating any more, she simply had to work her way through the slithery pyramid until she felt as if she must burst. Nor did Maestro Gambone do anything to make up for the state of discouragement into which her unfamiliar surroundings and her inability to talk had plunged her. Nancy found his little apartment at the top of a tall tumbledown yellow house that was clinging to the side of the almost sheer Vomero. He was a tiny man with snow-white hair and imperial and jet-black eyebrows and moustache. With his glittering eyes he reminded her of a much polished five of dominos, and when he wanted anything in a hurry (and he always did want things in a hurry) he seemed to slide about the room with the rattle of a shuffled domino. Although his apartment stood so high, it was in a perpetual green twilight on account of the creepers growing in rusty petrol tins that covered all the windows. “You speaka _italiano_, madama?” he asked abruptly when Nancy presented herself. “No, I’m afraid I don’t.” “_Allora come canta?_ How you singa, madama?” “I only sing in English at present.” “What musica you havva?” Nancy produced the stock-in-trade of ballads, which the maestro fingered like noxious reptiles. “_E questo?_ Anna Lowrie _o qualche nome indiavolato. Probiamolo. Avanti!_”