He might have been less stung if they hadn't just made love. Twice.

    "Boring?"

    "No, not boring, that's unfair. Bland."

    "Bland?"

    "No."

    "What, then?"

    "I don't know. I can't put my finger on it. I can't think of a word."

    Great. He was a category unto himself—a unique category, indefinable by words but falling somewhere between "boring" and "bland."

    He had lost his temper, hurling a pillow across the room and swearing at her. He could still recall every moment of the long walk back to his own college, creeping down the staircase from her rooms, stepping through the pale dawn of Trinity Great Court, the bittersweet taste of self-pity rendering him immune to the daggered look from the porter on duty in the lodge.

    Pathetic, really, when looked at from a distance, from the darkened sleeping compartment of a train hurtling through the French night, for example. He tried to stem the flow of his thoughts, or at least divert their course. When he failed, he turned on the light and worked on his Italian grammar.

    Dawn rose, bringing with it the barely discernible mass of a steep Alpine valley. A few hours later, they were free of the mountains.

    All he saw of Milan was the Fascist splendor of the Stazione Centrale as he hurried between platforms to make his connecting train. He was aware of the heat and the smell of unfamiliar tobacco, but not much else. He briefly glimpsed Shelley's "waveless plain of Lombardy" before nodding off.

    A deep and dreamless sleep carried him all the way to Florence, where he was woken brusquely by the guard, who talked at him in a language quite unlike the Italian he'd learned at school and recently brushed up on. Ejected onto the platform, he felt this certainly wasn't the kind of reception he'd been led to believe he might receive in Italy.