She made room for the Marchesa beside her.
But the Marchesa declared that she must go home and drag one of her boys, who was studying for an examination, out for exercise.

'Oh! these examinations--they are _horrors_!' she said, throwing up her hands.
'No--these poor boys!--and they have no games like the English boys.

But you were speaking about the war--about our poor Italy ?' She paused.

She laid her hand on Lucy's shoulder and looked down into the girl's face.

Her eyes became for a moment veiled and misty, as though ghosts passed before them--the grisly calamities and slaughters of the war.
Then they cleared and sparkled.
'I tell you, Mademoiselle,' she said slowly, in her difficult picturesque English, 'that what Italy has done in forty years is colossal!--not to be believed! You have taken a hundred years--you!--to make a nation, and you have had a big civil war.