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at the Hotel Bellevue, at the table, in front of an empty fourth spot, Renata had explained to her that it belonged to a young American friend of hers who almost always arrived late because he only left the room when he had finished writing. "You will hear about him in the future," Renata had prophesied. Hemingway also remembered the meeting. It was in 1923 and there was more than a meter of snow, exactly. 

As we passed into the boudoir to have coffee, Aunt Emma went up to her second-floor apartment to take the portrait the pianist had given her. As soon as he entered the boudoir, Hemingway stopped to look at the tapestry with motifs of garlands and flowers and asked what era it was. It was an eighteenth-century French silk tapestry, I explained to Mom. Then Hemingway admired the two large vases under the mirror stating that he had never seen similar ones. Mom explained to him that, at the time when chinoiseries were in fashion, in Murano they sometimes decorated glass vases by applying inside, with a particular technique, a film with Chinese motifs and figures that gave the optical impression of being an integral part of the vase. 

Aunt Emma came back with Sargent's portrait of Renata, and Hemingway said that she was Renata as she is and that it was a really good portrait and I was delighted because they could no longer say that I was walking around with an "unknown stranger" since mom and aunt Emma had already met him in 1923.

While Aunt Emma was taking Mary into the drawing room to look at the tapestries, Hemingway walked over to my mother again and said with a smile: "Miss Dora, you must excuse me if I sometimes use a bit strong language in my books. But it's not my fault: it's my characters who want it." Then they began to discuss books, a familiar subject for my mother who, already a great reader, had spent most of her sleepless nights reading since my father's death and had accumulated an impressive number of volumes.