The _padrona di casa_ was smartly dressed and freshly powdered. She wore huge pearl and diamond peasant earrings, and her wonderful hair with its thick regular waves shone like the plumage of the black swan in the Villa Borghese. She recognized me with a smile. “Ah, the American lady! What a pleasure to see her again!” She motioned me to the room where the theatrical costumes had been packed closely together to give more space. The light from a big window struck across the gaunt barn of a place and fell on a group in the center that Andrea del Sarto would have painted as a “Visitation.” Rosina, the wrinkled old woman, looked a perfect Elizabeth as she stood there, holding her daughter-in-law by the hand: Lucia would have made a lovely Mary. The young woman saw me first. She came towards me slowly, heavily, took my hand in hers and with a strange solemnity kissed me on the mouth; Francesco, her husband (the plumber), followed her example. Caterina, sitting up in the big white bed, smiled at me with a radiant inner lighting of the face, like a young martyr. Rosina mumbled my hand with her withered lips and wiped her eyes upon a black-bordered handkerchief I had given her; all this was before they caught a glimpse of the porter’s wife, toiling upstairs with the gigantic bundle. I was the first stranger who had come into the new life that was opening before them, after they had passed through that hell of suffering at Messina. The shackles of convention had dropped from them in that elemental experience, that fearful convulsion when the very earth had stoned them. They met me as equals on the ground of our common humanity; they embraced me because I had brought them help from America, the land of hope. When we grow old, I heard a poet say, we count the treasure of unforgotten kisses as a miser counts his gold; In the coming years those kisses, given for my country’s sake, will shine bright in my imperishable hoard. The next day, Monday morning, January 4th, as we were having early coffee, Agnese brought in a note. “Anything interesting?” I asked, as J. folded the small sheet of lilac paper and put it back in the envelope. “It looks like an invitation.” “It is,” said J., “one I shall accept.”