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Indian Summer

by William Dean Howells · English · Gutenberg #7359 · 548,709 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Indian Summer

Author: William Dean Howells


        
Release date: January 1, 2005 [eBook #7359]
                Most recently updated: March 2, 2015

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/7359

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INDIAN SUMMER ***




Produced by David Garcia, Eric Eldred, Charles Franks, and
the Online Distributed Proofreaders Team










INDIAN SUMMER

BY

WILLIAM D. HOWELLS

AUTHOR OF "THE RISE OF SILAS LAPHAM," "A MODERN INSTANCE,"
"WOMAN'S REASON," ETC.







INDIAN SUMMER

       *       *       *       *       *

I


Midway of the Ponte Vecchio at Florence, where three arches break the
lines of the little jewellers' booths glittering on either hand, and
open an approach to the parapet, Colville lounged against the corner of
a shop and stared out upon the river. It was the late afternoon of a day
in January, which had begun bright and warm, but had suffered a change
of mood as its hours passed, and now, from a sky dimmed with flying grey
clouds, was threatening rain. There must already have been rain in the
mountains, for the yellow torrent that seethed and swirled around the
piers of the bridge was swelling momently on the wall of the Lung' Arno,
and rolling a threatening flood toward the Cascine, where it lost itself
under the ranks of the poplars that seemed to file across its course,
and let their delicate tops melt into the pallor of the low horizon.

The city, with the sweep of the Lung' Arno on either hand, and its domes
and towers hung in the dull air, and the country with its white villas
and black cypresses breaking the grey stretches of the olive orchards on
its hill-sides, had alike been growing more and more insufferable; and
Colville was finding a sort of vindictive satisfaction in the power to
ignore the surrounding frippery of landscape and architecture. He
isolated himself so perfectly from it, as he brooded upon the river,
that, for any sensible difference, he might have been standing on the
Main Street Bridge at Des Vaches, Indiana, looking down at the tawny
sweep of the Wabash. He had no love for that stream, nor for the
ambitious town on its banks, but ever since he woke that morning he had
felt a growing conviction that he had been a great ass to leave them. He
had, in fact, taken the prodigious risk of breaking his life sharp off
from the course in which it had been set for many years, and of
attempting to renew it in a direction from which it had long been
diverted. Such an act could be precipitated only by a strong impulse of
conscience or a profound disgust, and with Colville it sprang from
disgust. He had experienced a bitter disappointment in the city to whose
prosperity he had given the energies of his best years, and in whose
favour he imagined that he had triumphantly established himself.

He had certainly made the Des Vaches _Democrat-Republican_ a very good
paper; its ability was recognised throughout the State, and in Des
Vaches people of all parties were proud of it. They liked every morning
to see what Colville said; they believed that in his way he was the
smartest man in the State, and they were fond of claiming that there was
no such writer on any of the Indianapolis papers. They forgave some
political heresies to the talent they admired; they permitted him the
whim of free trade, they laughed tolerantly when he came out in favour
of civil service reform, and no one had much fault to find when the
_Democrat-Republican_ bolted the nomination of a certain politician of
its party for Congress. But when Colville permitted his own name to be
used by the opposing party, the people arose in their might and defeated
him by a tremendous majority. That was what the regular nominee said. It
was a withering rebuke to treason, in the opinion of this gentleman; it
was a good joke, anyway, with the Democratic managers who had taken
Colville up, being all in the Republican family; whichever it was, it
was a mortification for Colville which his pride could not brook. He
stood disgraced before the community not only as a theorist and
unpractical doctrinaire, but as a dangerous man; and what was worse, he
could not wholly acquit himself of a measure of bad faith; his
conscience troubled him even more than his pride. Money was found, and a
printer bought up with it to start a paper in opposition to the
_Democrat-Republican_. Then Colville contemptuously offered to sell out
to the Republican committee in charge of the new enterprise, and they
accepted his terms.

In private life he found much of the old kindness returning to him; and
his successful opponent took the first opportunity of heaping coals of
fire on his head in the public street, when he appeared to the outer eye
to be shaking hands with Colville. During the months that he remained to
close up his affairs after the sale of his paper, the
_Post-Democrat-Republican_ (the newspaper had agglutinated the titles of
two of its predecessors, after the fashion of American journals) was
fulsome in its complimentary allusions to him. It politely invented the
fiction that he was going to Europe for his health, impaired by his
journalistic labours, and adventurously promised its readers that they
might hope to hear from him from time to time in its columns. In some
of its allusions to him Colville detected the point of a fine irony, of
which he had himself introduced the practice in the _Democrat-Republican_;
and he experienced, with a sense of personal impoverishment, the
curious fact that a journalist of strong characteristics leaves
the tradition of himself in such degree with the journal he has
created that he seems to bring very little away. He was obliged
to confess in his own heart that the paper was as good as ever.
The assistants, who had trained themselves to write like him, seemed to
be writing quite as well, and his honesty would not permit him to
receive the consolation offered him by the friends who told him that
there was a great falling off in the _Post-Democrat-Republican_. Except
that it was rather more Stalwart in its Republicanism, and had turned
quite round on the question of the tariff, it was very much what it had
always been. It kept the old decency of tone which he had given it, and
it maintained the literary character which he was proud of. The new
management must have divined that its popularity, with the women at
least, was largely due to its careful selections of verse and fiction,
its literary news, and its full and piquant criticisms, with their long
extracts from new books. It was some time since he had personally looked
after this department, and the young fellow in charge of it under him
had remained with the paper. Its continued excellence, which he could
not have denied if he had wished, seemed to leave him drained and
feeble, and it was partly from the sense of this that he declined the
overtures, well backed up with money, to establish an independent paper
in Des Vaches. He felt that there was not fight enough in him for the
work, even if he had not taken that strong disgust for public life which
included the place and its people. He wanted to get away, to get far
away, and with the abrupt and total change in his humour he reverted to
a period in his life when journalism and politics and the ambition of
Congress were things undreamed of.

At that period he was a very young architect, with an inclination toward
the literary side of his profession, which made it seem profitable to
linger, with his Ruskin in his hand, among the masterpieces of Italian
Gothic, when perhaps he might have been better employed in designing
red-roofed many-verandaed, consciously mullioned seaside cottages on the
New England coast. He wrote a magazine paper on the zoology of the
Lombardic pillars in Verona, very Ruskinian, very scornful of modern
motive. He visited every part of the peninsula, but he gave the greater
part of his time to North Italy, and in Venice he met the young girl
whom he followed to Florence. His love did not prosper; when she went
away she left him in possession of that treasure to a man of his
temperament, a broken heart. From that time his vague dreams began to
lift, and to let him live in the clear light of common day; but he was
still lingering at Florence, ignorant of the good which had befallen
him, and cowering within himself under the sting of wounded vanity, when
he received a letter from his elder brother suggesting that he should
come and see how he liked the architecture of Des Vaches. His brother
had been seven years at Des Vaches, where he had lands, and a lead-mine,
and a scheme for a railroad, and had lately added a daily newspaper to
his other enterprises. He had, in fact, added two newspapers; for having
unexpectedly and almost involuntarily become the owner of the Des Vaches
_Republican_, the fancy of building up a great local journal seized him,
and he bought the _Wabash Valley Democrat_, uniting them under the name
of the _Democrat-Republican_. But he had trouble almost from the first
with his editors, and he naturally thought of the brother with a turn
for writing who had been running to waste for the last year or two in
Europe. His real purpose was to work Colville into the management of his
paper when he invited him to come out and look at the architecture of
Des Vaches.

Colville went, because he was at that moment in the humour to go
anywhere, and because his money was running low, and he must begin work
somehow. He was still romantic enough to like the notion of the place a
little, because it bore the name given to it by the old French
_voyageurs_ from a herd of buffalo cows which they had seen grazing on
the site of their camp there; but when he came to the place itself he
did not like it. He hated it; but he stayed, and as an architect was the
last thing any one wanted in Des Vaches since the jail and court-house
had been built, he became, half without his willing it, a newspaper man.
He learned in time to relish the humorous intimacy of the life about
him; and when it was decided that he was no fool--there were doubts,
growing out of his Eastern accent and the work of his New York tailor,
at first--he found himself the object of a pleasing popularity. In due
time he bought his brother out; he became very fond of newspaper life,
its constant excitements and its endless variety; and six weeks before
he sold his paper he would have scoffed at a prophecy of his return to
Europe for the resumption of any artistic purpose whatever. But here he
was, lounging on the Ponte Vecchio at Florence, whither he had come with
the intention of rubbing up his former studies, and of perhaps getting
back to put them in practice at New York ultimately. He had said to
himself before coming abroad that he was in no hurry; that he should
take it very easily--he had money enough for that; yet he would keep
architecture before him as an object, for he had lived long in a
community where every one was intensely occupied, and he unconsciously
paid to Des Vaches the tribute of feeling that an objectless life was
disgraceful to a man.

In the meantime he suffered keenly and at every moment the loss of the
occupation of which he had bereaved himself; in thinking of quite other
things, in talk of totally different matters, from the dreams of night,
he woke with a start to the realisation of the fact that he had no
longer a newspaper. He perceived now, as never before, that for fifteen
years almost every breath of his life had been drawn with reference to
his paper, and that without it he was in some sort lost, and, as it
were, extinct. A tide of ridiculous home-sickness, which was an
expression of this passionate regret for the life he had put behind him,
rather than any longing for Des Vaches, swept over him, and the first
passages of a letter to the _Post-Democrat-Republican_ began to shape
themselves in his mind. He had always, when he left home for New York or
Washington, or for his few weeks of summer vacation on the Canadian
rivers or the New England coast, written back to his readers, in whom he
knew he could count upon quick sympathy in all he saw and felt, and he
now found himself addressing them with that frank familiarity which
comes to the journalist, in minor communities, from the habit of print.
He began by confessing to them the defeat of certain expectations with
which he had returned to Florence, and told them that they must not look
for anything like the ordinary letters of travel from him. But he was
not so singular in his attitude toward the place as he supposed; for any
tourist who comes to Florence with the old-fashioned expectation of
impressions will probably suffer a disappointment, unless he arrives
very young and for the first time. It is a city superficially so well
known that it affects one somewhat like a collection of views of itself;
they are from the most striking points, of course, but one has examined
them before, and is disposed to be critical of them. Certain emotions,
certain sensations failed to repeat themselves to Colville at sight of
the familiar monuments, which seemed to wear a hardy and indifferent
air, as if being stared at so many years by so many thousands of
travellers had extinguished in them that sensibility which one likes to
fancy in objects of interest everywhere.

The life which was as vivid all about him as if caught by the latest
instantaneous process made the same comparatively ineffective appeal.
The operatic spectacle was still there. The people, with their cloaks
statuesquely draped over their left shoulders, moved down the street, or
posed in vehement dialogue on the sidewalks; the drama of bargaining,
with the customer's scorn, the shopman's pathos, came through the open
shop door; the handsome, heavy-eyed ladies, the bare-headed girls,
thronged the ways; the caffès were full of the well-remembered figures
over their newspapers and little cups; the officers were as splendid as
of old, with their long cigars in their mouths, their swords kicking
against their beautiful legs, and their spurs jingling; the dandies,
with their little dogs and their flower-like smiles, were still in front
of the confectioners' for the inspection of the ladies who passed; the
old beggar still crouched over her scaldino at the church door, and the
young man with one leg, whom he thought to escape by walking fast, had
timed him to a second from the other side of the street. There was the
wonted warmth in the sunny squares, and the old familiar damp and stench
in the deep narrow streets. But some charm had gone out of all this. The
artisans coming to the doors of their shallow booths for the light on
some bit of carpentering, or cobbling, or tinkering; the crowds swarming
through the middle of the streets on perfect terms with the wine-carts
and cab horses; the ineffective grandiosity of the palaces huddled upon
the crooked thoroughfares; the slight but insinuating cold of the
southern winter, gathering in the shade and dispersing in the sun, and
denied everywhere by the profusion of fruit and flowers, and by the
greenery of gardens showing through the grated portals and over the tops
of high walls; the groups of idle poor, permanently or temporarily
propped against the bases of edifices with a southern exposure; the
priests and monks and nuns in their gliding passage; the impassioned
snapping of the cabmen's whips; the clangour of bells that at some hours
inundated the city, and then suddenly subsided and left it to the
banging of coppersmiths; the open-air frying of cakes, with its
primitive smell of burning fat; the tramp of soldiery, and the fanfare
of bugles blown to gay measures--these and a hundred other
characteristic traits and facts still found a response in the
consciousness where they were once a rapture of novelty; but the
response was faint and thin; he could not warm over the old mood in
which he once treasured them all away as of equal preciousness.

Of course there was a pleasure in recognising some details of former
experience in Florence as they recurred. Colville had been met at once
by a _festa_, when nothing could be done, and he was more than consoled
by the caressing sympathy with which he was assured that his broken
trunk could not be mended till the day after to-morrow; he had quite
forgotten about the festas and the sympathy. That night the piazza on
which he lodged seemed full of snow to the casual glance he gave it;
then he saw that it was the white Italian moonlight, which he had also
forgotten....






II


Colville had readied this point in that sarcastic study of his own
condition of mind for the advantage of his late readers in the
_Post-Democrat-Republican_, when he was aware of a polite rustling of
draperies, with an ensuing well-bred murmur, which at once ignored him,
deprecated intrusion upon him, and asserted a common right to the
prospect on which he had been dwelling alone. He looked round with an
instinctive expectation of style and poise, in which he was not
disappointed. The lady, with a graceful lift of the head and a very
erect carriage, almost Bernhardtesque in the backward fling of her
shoulders and the strict compression of her elbows to her side, was
pointing out the different bridges to the little girl who was with her.

"That first one is the Santa Trinità, and the next is the Carraja, and
that one quite down by the Cascine is the iron bridge. The Cascine you
remember--the park where we were driving--that clump of woods there----"

A vagueness expressive of divided interest had crept into the lady's
tone rather than her words. Colville could feel that she was waiting for
the right moment to turn her delicate head, sculpturesquely defined by
its toque, and steal an imperceptible glance at him: and he
involuntarily afforded her the coveted excuse by the slight noise he
made in changing his position in order to be able to go away as soon as
he had seen whether she was pretty or not. At forty-one the question is
still important to every man with regard to every woman.

"Mr. Colville!"

The gentle surprise conveyed in the exclamation, without time for
recognition, convinced Colville, upon a cool review of the facts, that
the lady had known him before their eyes met.

"Why, Mrs. Bowen!" he said.

She put out her round, slender arm, and gave him a frank clasp of her
gloved hand. The glove wrinkled richly up the sleeve of her dress
half-way to her elbow. She bent on his face a demand for just what
quality and degree of change he found in hers, and apparently she
satisfied herself that his inspection was not to her disadvantage, for
she smiled brightly, and devoted the rest of her glance to an electric
summary of the facts of Colville's physiognomy; the sufficiently good
outline of his visage, with its full, rather close-cut, drabbish-brown
beard and moustache, both shaped a little by the ironical self-conscious
smile that lurked under them; the non-committal, rather weary-looking
eyes; the brown hair, slightly frosted, that showed while he stood with
his hat still off. He was a little above the middle height, and if it
must be confessed, neither his face nor his figure had quite preserved
their youthful lines. They were both much heavier than when Mrs. Bowen
saw them last, and the latter here and there swayed beyond the strict
bounds of symmetry. She was herself in that moment of life when, to the
middle-aged observer, at least, a woman's looks have a charm which is
wanting to her earlier bloom. By that time her character has wrought
itself more clearly out in her face, and her heart and mind confront you
more directly there. It is the youth of her spirit which has come to the
surface.

"I should have known you anywhere," she exclaimed, with friendly
pleasure in seeing him.

"You are very kind," said Colville. "I didn't know that I had preserved
my youthful beauty to that degree. But I can imagine it--if you say so,
Mrs. Bowen."

"Oh, I assure you that you have!" she protested; and now she began
gently to pursue him with one fine question after another about himself,
till she had mastered the main facts of his history since they had last
met. He would not have known so well how to possess himself of hers,
even if he had felt the same necessity; but in fact it had happened that
he had heard of her from time to time at not very long intervals. She
had married a leading lawyer of her Western city, who in due time had
gone to Congress, and after his term was out had "taken up his
residence" in Washington, as the newspapers said, "in his elegant
mansion at the corner of & Street and Idaho Avenue." After that he
remembered reading that Mrs. Bowen was going abroad for the education of
her daughter, from which he made his own inferences concerning her
marriage. And "You knew Mr. Bowen was no longer living?" she said, with
fit obsequy of tone.

"Yes, I knew," he answered, with decent sympathy.

"This is my little Effie," said Mrs. Bowen after a moment; and now the
child, hitherto keeping herself discreetly in the background, came
forward and promptly gave her hand to Colville, who perceived that she
was not so small as he had thought her at first; an effect of infancy
had possibly been studied in the brevity of her skirts and the
immaturity of her corsage, but both were in good taste, and really to
the advantage of her young figure. There was reason and justice in her
being dressed as she was, for she really was not so old as she looked by
two or three years; and there was reason in Mrs. Bowen's carrying in the
hollow of her left arm the India shawl sacque she had taken off and hung
there; the deep cherry silk lining gave life to the sombre tints
prevailing in her dress, which its removal left free to express all the
grace of her extremely lady-like person. Lady-like was the word for Mrs.
Bowen throughout--for the turn of her head, the management of her arm
from the elbow, the curve of her hand from wrist to finger-tips, the
smile, subdued, but sufficiently sweet, playing about her little mouth,
which was yet not too little, and the refined and indefinite perfume
which exhaled from the ensemble of her silks, her laces, and her gloves,
like an odorous version of that otherwise impalpable quality which women
call style. She had, with all her flexibility, a certain charming
stiffness, like the stiffness of a very tall feather.

"And have you been here a great while?" she asked, turning her head
slowly toward Colville, and looking at him with a little difficulty she
had in raising her eyelids; when she was younger the glance that shyly
stole from under the covert of their lashes was like a gleam of
sunshine, and it was still like a gleam of paler sunshine.

Colville, whose mood was very susceptible to the weather, brightened in
the ray. "I only arrived last night," he said, with a smile.

"How glad you must be to get back! Did you ever see Florence more
beautiful than it was this morning?"

"Not for years," said Colville, with another smile for her pretty
enthusiasm. "Not for seventeen years at the least calculation."

"Is it so many?" cried Mrs. Bowen, with lovely dismay. "Yes, it is," she
sighed, and she did not speak for an appreciable interval.

He knew that she was thinking of that old love affair of his, to which
she was privy in some degree, though he never could tell how much; and
when she spoke he perceived that she purposely avoided speaking of a
certain person, whom a woman of more tact or of less would have insisted
upon naming at once. "I never can believe in the lapse of time when I
get back to Italy; it always makes me feel as young as when I left it
last."

"I could imagine you'd never left it," said Colville.

Mrs. Bowen reflected a moment. "Is that a compliment?"

"I had an obscure intention of saying something fine; but I don't think
I've quite made it out," he owned.

Mrs. Bowen gave her small, sweet smile. "It was very nice of you to try.
But I haven't really been away for some time; I've taken a house in
Florence, and I've been here two years. Palazzo Pinti, Lung' Arno della
Zecca. You must come and see me. Thursdays from four till six."

"Thank you," said Colville.

"I'm afraid," said Mrs. Bowen, remotely preparing to offer her hand in
adieu, "that Effie and I broke in upon some very important cogitations
of yours." She shifted the silken burden off her arm a little, and the
child stirred from the correct pose she had been keeping, and smiled
politely.

"I don't think they deserve a real dictionary word like that," said
Colville. "I was simply mooning. If there was anything definite in my
mind, I was wishing that I was looking down on the Wabash in Dos Vaches,
instead of the Arno in Florence."

"Oh! And I supposed you must be indulging all sorts of historical
associations with the place. Effie and I have been walking through the
Via de' Bardi, where Romola lived, and I was bringing her back over the
Ponte Vecchio, so as to impress the origin of Florence on her mind."

"Is that what makes Miss Effie hate it?" asked Colville, looking at the
child, whose youthful resemblance to her mother was in all things so
perfect that a fantastic question whether she could ever have had any
other parent swept through him. Certainly, if Mrs. Bowen were to marry
again, there was nothing in this child's looks to suggest the idea of a
predecessor to the second husband.

"Effie doesn't hate any sort of useful knowledge," said her mother half
jestingly. "She's just come to me from school at Vevay."

"Oh, then, I think she might," persisted Colville. "Don't you hate the
origin of Florence a little?" he asked of the child.

"I don't know enough about it," she answered, with a quick look of
question at her mother, and checking herself in a possibly indiscreet
smile.

"Ah, that accounts for it," said Colville, and he laughed. It amused him
to see the child referring even this point of propriety to her mother,
and his thoughts idled off to what Mrs. Bowen's own untrammelled
girlhood must have been in her Western city. For her daughter there were
to be no buggy rides, or concerts, or dances at the invitation of young
men; no picnics, free and unchaperoned as the casing air; no sitting on
the steps at dusk with callers who never dreamed of asking for her
mother; no lingering at the gate with her youthful escort home from the
ball--nothing of that wild, sweet liberty which once made American
girlhood a long rapture. But would she be any the better for her
privations, for referring not only every point of conduct, but every
thought and feeling, to her mother? He suppressed a sigh for the
inevitable change, but rejoiced that his own youth had fallen in the
earlier time, and said, "You will hate it as soon as you've read a
little of it."

"The difficulty is to read a little of Florentine history. I can't find
anything in less than ten or twelve volumes," said Mrs. Bowen. "Effie
and I were going to Viesseux's Library again, in desperation, to see if
there wasn't something shorter in French."

She now offered Colville her hand, and he found himself very reluctant
to let it go. Something in her looks did not forbid him, and when she
took her hand away, he said, "Let me go to Viesseux's with you, Mrs.
Bowen, and give you the advantage of my unprejudiced ignorance in the
choice of a book on Florence."

"Oh, I was longing to ask you!" said Mrs. Bowen frankly. "It is really
such a serious matter, especially when the book is for a young person.
Unless it's very dry, it's so apt to be--objectionable."

"Yes," said Colville, with a smile at her perplexity. He moved off down
the slope of the bridge with her, between the jewellers' shops, and felt
a singular satisfaction in her company. Women of fashion always
interested him; he liked them; it diverted him that they should take
themselves seriously. Their resolution, their suffering for their ideal,
such as it was, their energy in dressing and adorning themselves, the
pains they were at to achieve the trivialities they passed their lives
in, were perpetually delightful to him. He often found them people of
great simplicity, and sometimes of singularly good sense; their frequent
vein of piety was delicious.

Ten minutes earlier he would have said that nothing could have been less
welcome to him than this encounter, but now he felt unwilling to leave
Mrs. Bowen.

"Go before, Effie," she said; and she added, to Colville, "How very
Florentine all this is! If you dropped from the clouds on this spot
without previous warning, you would know that you were on the Ponte
Vecchio, and nowhere else."

"Yes, it's very Florentine," Colville assented. "The bridge is very well
as a bridge, but as a street I prefer the Main Street Bridge at Des
Vaches. I was looking at the jewellery before you came up, and I don't
think it's pretty, even the old pieces of peasant jewellery. Why do
people come here to look at it? If you were going to buy something for a
friend, would you dream of coming here for it?"

"Oh _no_!" replied Mrs. Bowen, with the deepest feeling.

They quitted the bridge, and turning to the left, moved down the street
which with difficulty finds space between the parapet of the river and
the shops of the mosaicists and dealers in statuary cramping it on the
other hand.

"Here's something distinctively Florentine too," said Colville. "These
table-tops, and paper-weights, and caskets, and photograph frames, and
lockets, and breast-pins; and here, this ghostly glare of undersized
Psyches and Hebes and Graces in alabaster."

"Oh, you mustn't think of any of them!" Mrs. Bowen broke in with horror.
"If your friend wishes you to get her something characteristically
Florentine, and at the same time very tasteful, you must go--"

Colville gave a melancholy laugh. "My friend is an abstraction, Mrs.
Bowen, without sex or any sort of entity."

"Oh!" said Mrs. Bowen. Some fine drops had begun to sprinkle the
pavement. "What a ridiculous blunder! It's raining! Effie, I'm afraid we
must give up your book for to-day. We're not dressed for damp weather,
and we'd better hurry home as soon as possible." She got promptly into
the shelter of a doorway, and gathered her daughter to her, while she
flung her sacque over her shoulder and caught her draperies from the
ground for the next movement. "Mr. Colville, will you please stop the
first closed carriage that comes in sight?"

A figure of _primo tenore_ had witnessed the manoeuvre from the box of
his cab; he held up his whip, and at a nod from Colville he drove
abreast of the doorway, his broken-kneed, tremulous little horse gay in
brass-mounted harness, and with a stiff turkey feather stuck upright at
one ear in his head-stall.

Mrs. Bowen had no more scruple than another woman in stopping travel and
traffic in a public street for her convenience. She now entered into a
brisk parting conversation with Colville, such as ladies love, blocking
the narrow sidewalk with herself, her daughter, and her open carriage
door, and making people walk round her cab, in the road, which they did
meekly enough, with the Florentine submissiveness to the pretensions of
any sort of vehicle. She said a dozen important things that seemed to
have just come into her head, and, "Why, how stupid I am!" she called
out, making Colville check the driver in his first start, after she had
got into the cab. "We are to have a few people tonight. If you have no
engagement, I should be so glad to have you come. Can't you?"

"Yes, I can," said Colville, admiring the whole transaction and the
parties to it with a passive smile.

After finding her pocket, she found that her card-case was not in it,
but in the purse she had given Effie to carry; but she got her address
at last, and gave it to Colville, though he said he should remember it
without. "Any time between nine and eleven," she said. "It's so nice of
you to promise!"

She questioned him from under her half-lifted eyelids, and he added,
with a laugh, "I'll come!" and was rewarded with two pretty smiles, just
alike, from mother and daughter, as they drove away.






III


Twenty years earlier, when Mrs. Bowen was Miss Lina Ridgely, she used to
be the friend and confidante of the girl who jilted Colville. They were
then both so young that they could scarcely have been a year out of
school before they left home for the year they were spending in Europe;
but to the young man's inexperience they seemed the wisest and maturest
of society women. His heart quaked in his breast when he saw them
talking and laughing together, for fear they should be talking and
laughing about him; he was even a little more afraid of Miss Ridgely
than of her friend, who was dashing and effective, where Miss Ridgely
was serene and elegant, according to his feeling at that time; but he
never saw her after his rejection, and it was not till he read of her
marriage with the Hon. Mr. Bowen that certain vague impressions began to
define themselves. He then remembered that Lina Ridgely in many fine
little ways had shown a kindness, almost a compassion, for him, as for
one whose unconsciousness a hopeless doom impended over. He perceived
that she had always seemed to like him--a thing that had not occurred to
him in the stupid absorption of his passion for the other--and fragments
of proof that she had probably defended and advocated him occurred to
him, and inspired a vain and retrospective gratitude; he abandoned
himself to regrets, which were proper enough in regard to Miss Ridgely,
but were certainly a little unlawful concerning Mrs. Bowen.

As he walked away toward his hotel he amused himself with the conjecture
whether he, with his forty-one years and his hundred and eighty five
pounds, were not still a pathetic and even a romantic figure to this
pretty and kindly woman, who probably imagined him as heart-broken as
ever. He was very willing to see more of her, if she wished; but with
the rain beginning to fall more thick and chill in the darkening street,
he could have postponed their next meeting till a pleasanter evening
without great self-denial. He felt a little twinge of rheumatism in his
shoulder when he got into his room, for your room in a Florentine hotel
is always some degrees colder than outdoors, unless you have fire in it;
and with the sun shining on his windows when he went out after lunch, it
had seemed to Colville ridiculous to have his morning fire kept up. The
sun was what he had taken the room for. It was in it, the landlord
assured him, from ten in the morning till four in the afternoon; and so,
in fact, it was, when it shone; but even then it was not fully in it,
but had a trick of looking in at the sides of the window, and painting
the chamber wall with a delusive glow. Colville raked away the ashes of
his fire-place, and throwing on two or three fagots of broom and pine
sprays, he had a blaze that would be very pretty to dress by after
dinner, but that gave out no warmth for the present. He left it, and
went down to the reading-room, as it was labelled over the door, in
homage to a predominance of English-speaking people among the guests;
but there was no fire there; that was kindled only by request, and he
shivered at the bare aspect of the apartment, with its cold piano, its
locked bookcases, and its table, where the London _Times_, the _Neue
Freie Presse_ of Vienna, and the _Italie_ of Rome exposed their titles,
one just beyond the margin of the other. He turned from the door and
went into the dining-room, where the stove was ostentatiously roaring
over its small logs and its lozenges of peat, But even here the fire had
been so recently lighted that the warmth was potential rather than
actual. By stooping down before the stove, and pressing his shoulder
against its brass doors, Colville managed to lull his enemy, while he
studied the figures of the woman-headed, woman-breasted hounds
developing into vines and foliage that covered the frescoed trellising
of the quadrangularly vaulted ceiling. The waiters, in their veteran
dress-coats, were putting the final touches to the table, and the sound
of voices outside the door obliged Colville to get up. The effort
involved made him still more reluctant about going out to Mrs. Bowen's.

The door opened, and some English ladies entered, faintly acknowledging,
provisionally ignoring, his presence, and talking of what they had been
doing since lunch. They agreed that it was really too cold in the
churches for any pleasure in the pictures, and that the Pitti Gallery,
where they had those braziers, was the only place you could go with
comfort. A French lady and her husband came in; a Russian lady followed;
an Italian gentleman, an American family, and three or four detached men
of the English-speaking race, whose language at once became the law of
the table.

As the dinner progressed from soup to fish, and from the _entrée_ to the
roast and salad, the combined effect of the pleasant cheer and the
increasing earnestness of the stove made the room warmer and warmer.
They drank Chianti wine from the wicker-covered flasks, tied with tufts
of red and green silk, in which they serve table wine at Florence, and
said how pretty the bottles were, but how the wine did not seem very
good.

"It certainly isn't so good as it used to be," said Colville.

"Ah, then you have been in Florhence before." said the French lady,
whose English proved to be much better than the French that he began to
talk to her in.

"Yes, a great while ago; in a state of pre-existence, in fact," he said.

The lady looked a little puzzled, but interested. "In a state of
prhe-existence?" she repeated.

"Yes; when I was young," he added, catching the gleam in her eye. "When
I was twenty-four. A great while ago."

"You must be an Amerhican," said the lady, with a laugh.

"Why do you think so? From my accent?"

"Frhom your metaphysics too. The Amerhicans like to talk in that way."

"I didn't know it," said Colville.

"They like to strhike the key of personality; they can't endure not
being interhested. They must rhelate everything to themselves or to
those with whom they are talking."

"And the French, no?" asked Colville.

The lady laughed again. "There is a large Amerhican colony in Parhis.
Perhaps we have learned to be like you."

The lady's husband did not speak English, and it was probably what they
had been saying that she interpreted to him, for he smiled, looking
forward to catch Colville's eye in a friendly way, and as if he would
not have him take his wife's talk too seriously.

The Italian gentleman on Colville's right was politely offering him the
salad, which had been left for the guests to pass to one another.
Colville thanked him in Italian, and they began to talk of Italian
affairs. One thing led to another, and he found that his new friend, who
was not yet his acquaintance, was a member of Parliament, and a
republican.

"That interests me as an American," said Colville. "But why do you want
a republic in Italy?"

"When we have a constitutional king, why should we have a king?" asked
the Italian.

An Englishman across the table relieved Colville from the difficulty of
answering this question by asking him another that formed talk about it
between them. He made his tacit observation that the English, since he
met them last, seemed to have grown in the grace of facile speech with
strangers; it was the American family which kept its talk within itself,
and hushed to a tone so low that no one else could hear it. Colville did
not like their mumbling; for the honour of the country, which we all
have at heart, however little we think it, he would have preferred that
they should speak up, and not seem afraid or ashamed; he thought the
English manner was better. In fact, he found himself in an unexpectedly
social mood; he joined in helping to break the ice; he laughed and
hazarded comment with those who were new-comers like himself, and was
very respectful of the opinions of people who had been longer in the
hotel, when they spoke of the cook's habit of underdoing the vegetables.
The dinner at the Hotel d'Atene made an imposing show on the _carte du
jour_; it looked like ten or twelve courses, but in fact it was five,
and even when eked out with roast chestnuts and butter into six, it
seemed somehow to stop very abruptly, though one seemed to have had
enough. You could have coffee afterward if you ordered it. Colville
ordered it, and was sorry when the last of his commensals, slightly
bowing him a good-night, left him alone to it.

He had decided that he need not fear the damp in a cab rapidly driven to
Mrs. Bowen's. When he went to his room he had his doubts about his
dress-coat; but he put it on, and he took the crush hat with which he
had provided himself in coming through London. That was a part of the
social panoply unknown in Des Vaches; he had hardly been a dozen times
in evening dress there in fifteen years, and his suit was as new as his
hat. As he turned to the glass he thought himself personable enough, and
in fact he was one of those men who look better in evening dress than in
any other: the broad expanse of shirt bosom, with its three small studs
of gold dropping, points of light, one below the other, softened his
strong, almost harsh face, and balanced his rather large head. In his
morning coat, people had to look twice at him to make sure that he did
not look common; but now he was not wrong in thinking that he had an air
of distinction, as he took his hat under his arm and stood before the
pier-glass in his room. He was almost tempted to shave, and wear his
moustache alone, as he used to do: he had let his beard grow because he
found that under the lax social regimen at Des Vaches he neglected
shaving, and went about days at a time with his face in an offensive
stubble. Taking his chin between his fingers, and peering closer into
the mirror, he wondered how Mrs. Bowen should have known him; she must
have remembered him very vividly. He would like to take off his beard
and put on the youthfulness that comes of shaving, and see what she
would say. Perhaps, he thought, with a last glance at his toilet, he was
overdoing it, if she were only to have a few people, as she promised. He
put a thick neckerchief over his chest so as not to provoke that
abominable rheumatism by any sort of exposure, and he put on his ulster
instead of the light spring overcoat that he had gone about with all
day.

He found that Palazzo Pinti, when you came to it, was rather a grand
affair, with a gold-banded porter eating salad in the lodge at the great
doorway, and a handsome gate of iron cutting you off from the regions
above till you had rung the bell of Mrs. Bowen's apartment, when it
swung open of itself, and you mounted. At her door a man in modified
livery received Colville, and helped him off with his overcoat so
skilfully that he did not hurt his rheumatic shoulder at all; there were
half a dozen other hats and coats on the carved chests that stood at
intervals along the wall, and some gayer wraps that exhaled a faint,
fascinating fragrance on the chilly air. Colville experienced the slight
exhilaration, the mingled reluctance and eagerness, of a man who
formally re-enters an assemblage of society after long absence from it,
and rubbing his hands a little nervously together, he put aside the
yellow Abruzzi blanket _portière_, and let himself into the brilliant
interior.

Mrs. Bowen stood in front of the fire in a brown silk of subdued
splendour, and with her hands and fan and handkerchief tastefully
composed before her. At sight of Colville she gave a slight start, which
would have betrayed to him, if he had been another woman, that she had
not really believed he would come, and came forward with a rustle and
murmur of pleasure to meet him; he had politely made a rush upon her, so
as to spare her this exertion, and he was tempted to a long-forgotten
foppishness of attitude as he stood talking with her during the brief
interval before she introduced him to any of the company. She had been
honest with him; there were not more than twenty-five or thirty people
there; but if he had overdone it in dressing for so small an affair, he
was not alone, and he was not sorry. He was sensible of a better
personal effect than the men in frock-coats and cut-aways were making,
and he perceived with self-satisfaction that his evening dress was of
better style than that of the others who wore it; at least no one else
carried a crush hat.--

At forty-one a man is still very much of a boy, and Colville was
obscurely willing that Mrs. Bowen, whose life since they last met at an
evening party had been passed chiefly at New York and Washington, should
see that he was a man of the world in spite of Des Vaches. Before she
had decided which of the company she should first present him to, her
daughter came up to his elbow with a cup of tea and some bread and
butter on a tray, and gave him good-evening with charming correctness of
manner. "Really," he said, turning about to take the cup, "I thought it
was you, Mrs. Bowen, who had got round to my side with a sash on. How do
you and Miss Effie justify yourselves in looking so bewitchingly alike?"

"You notice it, then?" Mrs. Bowen seemed delighted.

"I did every moment you were together to-day. You don't mind my having
been so personal in my observations?"

"Oh, not at all," said Mrs. Bowen, and Colville laughed.

"It must be true," he said, "what a French lady said to me at the
_table-d'hôte_ dinner to-night: 'the Amerhicans always strhike the note
of perhsonality.'" He neatly imitated the French lady's guttural accent.

"I suppose we do," mused Mis. Bowen, "and that we don't mind it in each
other. I wish _you_ would say which I shall introduce you to," she said,
letting her glance stray invisibly over her company, where all the
people seemed comfortably talking.

"Oh, there's no hurry; put it off till to-morrow," said Colville.

"Oh no; that won't do," said Mrs. Bowen, like a woman who has public
duties to perform, and is resolute to sacrifice her private pleasure to
them. But she postponed them a moment longer. "I hope you got home
before the rain," she said.

"Yes," returned Colville. "That is, I don't mind a little sprinkling.
Who is the Junonian young person at the end of the room?"

"Ah," said Mrs. Bowen, "you can't be introduced to _her_ first. But
_isn't_ she lovely?"

"Yes. It's a wonderful effect of white and gold."

"You mustn't say that to her. She was doubtful about her dress, because
she says that the ivory white with her hair makes her look just like
white and gold furniture."

"Present me at once, then, before I forget not to say it to her."

"No; I must keep you for some other person: anybody can talk to a pretty
girl."

Colville said he did not know whether to smile or shed tears at this
embittered compliment, and pretended an eagerness for the acquaintance
denied him.

Mrs. Bowen seemed disposed to intensify his misery. "Did you ever see a
more statuesque creature--with those superb broad shoulders and that
little head, and that thick braid brought round over the top? Doesn't
her face, with that calm look in those starry eyes, and that peculiar
fall of the corners of the mouth, remind you of some of those exquisite
great Du Maurier women? That style of face is very fashionable now: you
might think he had made it so."

"Is there a fashion in faces?" asked Colville.

"Why, certainly. You must know that."

"Then why aren't all the ladies in the fashion?"

"It isn't one that can be put on. Besides, every one hasn't got Imogene
Graham's figure to carry it off."

"That's her name, then--Imogene Graham. It's a very pretty name."

"Yes. She's staying with me for the winter. Now that's all I can allow
you to know for the present. Come! You must!"

"But this is worse than nothing." He made a feint of protesting as she
led him away, and named him to the lady she wished him to know. But he
was not really sorry; he had his modest misgivings whether he were equal
to quite so much young lady as Miss Graham seemed. When he no longer
looked at her he had a whimsical impression of her being a heroic statue
of herself.

The lady whom Mrs. Bowen left him with had not much to say, and she made
haste to introduce her husband, who had a great deal to say. He was an
Italian, but master of that very efficient English which the Italians
get together with unimaginable sufferings from our orthography, and
Colville repeated the republican deputy's saying about a constitutional
king, which he had begun to think was neat.

"I might prefer a republic myself," said the Italian, "but I think that
gentleman is wrong to be a republican where he is, and for the present.
The monarchy is the condition of our unity; nothing else could hold us
together, and we must remain united if we are to exist as a nation. It's
a necessity, like our army of half a million men. We may not like it in
itself, but we know that it is our salvation." He began to speak of the
economic state of Italy, of the immense cost of freedom and independence
to a people whose political genius enables them to bear quietly burdens
of taxation that no other government would venture to impose. He spoke
with that fond, that appealing patriotism, which expresses so much to
the sympathetic foreigner in Italy: the sense of great and painful
uncertainty of Italy's future through the complications of diplomacy,
the memory of her sufferings in the past, the spirit of quiet and
inexhaustible patience for trials to come. This resolution, which is
almost resignation, poetises the attitude of the whole people; it made
Colville feel as if he had done nothing and borne nothing yet.

"I am ashamed," he said, not without a remote resentment of the
unworthiness of the republican voters of Des Vaches, "when I hear of
such things, to think of what we are at home, with all our resources and
opportunities."

The Italian would have politely excused us to him, but Colville would
have no palliation of our political and moral nakedness; and he framed a
continuation of the letter he began on the Ponte Vecchio to the
_Post-Democrat-Republican_, in which he made a bitterly ironical
comparison of the achievements of Italy and America in the last ten
years.

He forgot about Miss Graham, and had only a vague sense of her splendour
as he caught sight of her in the long mirror which she stood before. She
was talking to a very handsome young clergyman, and smiling upon him.
The company seemed to be mostly Americans, but there were a good many
evident English also, and Colville was dimly aware of a question in his
mind whether this clergyman was English or American. There were three or
four Italians and there were some Germans, who spoke English.

Colville moved about from group to group as his enlarging acquaintance
led, and found himself more interested in society than he could ever
have dreamed of being again. It was certainly a defect of the life at
Des Vaches that people, after the dancing and love-making period, went
out rarely or never. He began to see that the time he had spent so
busily in that enterprising city had certainly been in some sense
wasted.

At a certain moment in the evening, which perhaps marked its
advancement, the tea-urn was replaced by a jug of the rum punch, mild or
strong according to the custom of the house, which is served at most
Florentine receptions. Some of the people went immediately after, but
the young clergyman remained talking with Miss Graham.

Colville, with his smoking glass in his hand, found himself at the side
of a friendly old gentleman who had refused the punch. They joined in
talk by a common impulse, and the old gentleman said, directly, "You are
an American, I presume?"

His accent had already established the fact of his own nationality, but
he seemed to think it the part of candour to say, when Colville had
acknowledged his origin, "I'm an American myself."

"I've met several of our countrymen since I arrived," suggested
Colville.

The old gentleman seemed to like this way of putting it. "Well, yes,
we're not unfairly represented here in numbers, I must confess. But I'm
bound to say that I don't find our countrymen so aggressive, so loud, as
our international novelists would make out. I haven't met any of their
peculiar heroines as yet, sir."

Colville could not help laughing. "I wish _I_ had. But perhaps they
avoid people of our years and discretion, or else take such a filial
attitude toward us that we can't recognise them."

"Perhaps, perhaps," cried the old gentleman, with cheerful assent.

"I was talking with one of our German friends here just now, and he
complained that the American girls--especially the rich ones--seem very
calculating and worldly and conventional. I told him I didn't know how
to account for that. I tried to give him some notion of the ennobling
influences of society in Newport, as I've had glimpses of it."

The old gentleman caressed his elbows, which he was holding in the palms
of his hands, in high enjoyment of Colville's sarcasm. "Ah! very good!
very good!" he said. "I quite agree with you, and I think the other sort
are altogether preferable."

"I think," continued Colville, dropping his ironical tone, "that we've
much less to regret in their unsuspecting, unsophisticated freedom than
in the type of hard materialism which we produce in young girls,
perfectly wide awake, disenchanted, unromantic, who prefer the worldly
vanities and advantages deliberately and on principle, recognising
something better merely to despise it. I've sometimes seen them----"

Mrs. Bowen came up in her gentle, inquiring way. "I'm glad that you and
Mr. Colville have made acquaintance," she said to the old gentleman.

"Oh, but we haven't," said Colville. "We're entire strangers."

"Then I'll introduce you to Rev. Mr. Waters. And take you away," she
added, putting her hand through Colville's arm with a delicate touch
that flattered his whole being, "for your time's come at last, and I'm
going to present you to Miss Graham."

"I don't know," he said. "Of course, as there is a Miss Graham, I can't
help being presented to her, but I had almost worked myself up to the
point of wishing there were none. I believe I'm afraid."

"Oh, I don't believe that at all. A simple schoolgirl like that!" Mrs.
Bowen's sense of humour had not the national acuteness. She liked joking
in men, but she did not know how to say funny things back "You'll see,
as you come up to her."






IV


Miss Graham did, indeed, somehow diminish in the nearer perspective. She
ceased to be overwhelming. When Colville lifted his eyes from bowing
before her he perceived that she--was neither so very tall nor so very
large, but possessed merely a generous amplitude of womanhood. But she
was even more beautiful, with a sweet and youthful radiance of look that
was very winning. If she had ceased to be the goddess she looked across
the length of the _salon_, she had gained much by becoming an extremely
lovely young girl; and her teeth, when she spoke, showed a fascinating
little irregularity that gave her the last charm.

Mrs. Bowen glided away with the young clergyman, but Effie remained at
Miss Graham's side, and seemed to have hold of the left hand which the
girl let hang carelessly behind her in the volume of her robe. The
child's face expressed an adoration of Miss Graham far beyond her
allegiance to her mother.

"I began to doubt whether Mrs. Bowen was going to bring you at all," she
said frankly, with an innocent, nervous laugh, which made favour for her
with Colville. "She promised it early in the evening."

"She has used me much worse, Miss Graham," said Colville. "She has kept
me waiting from the beginning of time. So that I have grown grey on my
way up to you," he added, by an inspiration. "I was a comparatively
young man when Mrs. Bowen first told me she was going to introduce me."

"Oh, how _good_!" said Miss Graham joyously. And her companion, after a
moment's hesitation, permitted herself a polite little titter. She had
made a discovery; she had discovered that Mr. Colville was droll.

"I'm very glad you like it," he said, with a gravity that did not
deceive them.

"Oh yes," sighed Miss Graham, with generous ardour. "Who but an American
could say just such things? There's the loveliest old lady here in
Florence, who's lived here thirty years, and she's always going back and
never getting back, and she's so homesick she doesn't know what to do,
and she always says that Americans may not be _better_ than other
people, but they are _different_."

"That's very pretty. They're different in everything but thinking
themselves better. Their native modesty prevents that."

"I don't exactly know what you mean," said Miss Graham, after a little
hesitation.

"Well," returned Colville, "I haven't thought it out very clearly myself
yet. I may mean that the Americans differ from other people in not
thinking well of themselves, or they may differ from them in not
thinking well enough. But what I said had a very epigrammatic sound, and
I prefer not to investigate it too closely."

This made Miss Graham and Miss Effie both cry out "Oh!" in delighted
doubt of his intention. They both insensibly drifted a little nearer to
him.

"There was a French lady said to me at the _table-d'hote_ this evening
that she knew I was an American, because the Americans always strike the
key of personality." He practised these economies of material in
conversation quite recklessly, and often made the same incident or
suggestion do duty round a whole company.

"Ah, I don't believe that," said Miss Graham.

"Believe what?"

"That the Americans always talk about themselves."

"I'm not sure she meant that. You never can tell what a person means by
what he says--or _she_."

"How shocking!".

"Perhaps the French lady meant that we always talk about other people.
That's in the key of personality too."

"But I don't believe we do," said Miss Graham. "At any rate, _she_ was
talking about _us_, then."

"Oh, she accounted for that by saying there was a large American colony
in Paris, who had corrupted the French, and taught them our pernicious
habit of introspection."

"Do you think we're very introspective?"

"Do you?"

"I know I'm not. I hardly ever think about myself at all. At any rate,
not till it's too late. That's the great trouble. I wish I could. But
I'm always studying other people. They're so much more interesting."

"Perhaps if you knew yourself better you wouldn't think so," suggested
Colville.

"Yes, I know they are. I don't think any young person can be
interesting."

"Then what becomes of all the novels? They're full of young persons."

"They're ridiculous. If I were going to write a novel, I should take an
old person for a hero--thirty-five or forty." She looked at Colville,
and blushing a little, hastened to add, "I don't believe that they begin
to be interesting much before that time. Such flat things as young men
are always saying! Don't you remember that passage somewhere in Heine's
_Pictures of Travel_, where he sees the hand of a lady coming out from
under her mantle, when she's confessing in a church, and he knows that
it's the hand of a young person who has enjoyed nothing and suffered
nothing, it's so smooth and flower-like? After I read that I hated the
look of my hands--I was only sixteen, and it seemed as if I had had no
more experience than a child. Oh, I like people to go _through_
something. Don't you?"

"Well, yes, I suppose I do. Other people."

"No; but don't you like it for yourself?"

"I can't tell; I haven't been through anything worth speaking of yet."

Miss Graham looked at him dubiously, but pursued with ardour: "Why, just
getting back to Florence, after not having been here for so long--I
should think it would be so romantic. Oh dear! I wish I were here for
the second time."

"I'm afraid you wouldn't like it so well," said Colville. "I wish I were
here for the first time. There's nothing like the first time in
everything."

"Do you really think so?"

"Well, there's nothing like the first time in Florence."

"Oh, I can't imagine it. I should think that recalling the old emotions
would be perfectly fascinating."

"Yes, if they'd come when you do call them. But they're as
contrary-minded as spirits from the vasty deep. I've been shouting
around here for my old emotions all day, and I haven't had a responsive
squeak."

"Oh!" cried Miss Graham, staring full-eyed at him. "How delightful!"
Effie Bowen turned away her pretty little head and laughed, as if it
might not be quite kind to laugh at a person's joke to his face.

Stimulated by their appreciation, Colville went on with more nonsense.
"No; the only way to get at your old emotions in regard to Florence is
to borrow them from somebody who's having them fresh. What do _you_
think about Florence, Miss Graham?"

"I? I've been here two months."

"Then it's too late?"

"No, I don't know that it is. I keep feeling the strangeness all the
time. But I can't tell you. It's very different from Buffalo, I can
assure you."

"Buffalo? I can imagine the difference. And it's not altogether to the
disadvantage of Buffalo."

"Oh, have you been there?" asked Miss Graham, with a touching little
eagerness. "Do you know anybody in Buffalo?"

"Some of the newspaper men; and I pass through there once a year on my
way to New York--or used to. It's a lively place."

"Yes, it is," sighed Miss Graham fondly.

"Do the girls of Buffalo still come out at night and dance by the light
of the moon?"

"What!"

"Ah, I see," said Colville, peering at her under his thoughtfully
knitted brows, "you do belong to another era. You don't remember the old
negro minstrel song."

"No," said Miss Graham. "I can only remember the end of the war."

"How divinely young!" said Colville. "Well," he added, "I wish that
French lady could have overheard us, Miss Graham. I think she would have
changed her mind about Americans striking the note of personality in
their talk."

"Oh!" exclaimed the girl reproachfully, after a moment of swift
reflection and recognition, "I don't see how you could let me do it! You
don't suppose that I should have talked so with every one? It was
because you were another American, and such an old friend of Mrs.
Bowen's."

"That is what I shall certainly tell the French lady if she attacks me
about it," said Colville. He glanced carelessly toward the end of the
room, and saw the young clergyman taking leave of Mrs. Bowen; all the
rest of the company were gone. "Bless me!" he said, "I must be going."

Mrs. Bowen had so swiftly advanced upon him that she caught the last
words. "Why?" she asked.

"Because it's to-morrow, I suspect, and the invitation was for one day
only."

"It was a season ticket," said Mrs. Bowen, with gay hospitality, "and it
isn't to-morrow for half an hour yet. I can't think of letting you go.
Come up to the fire, all, and let's sit down by it. It's at its very
best."

Effie looked a pretty surprise and a pleasure in this girlish burst from
her mother, whose habitual serenity made it more striking in contrast,
and she forsook Miss Graham's hand and ran forward and disposed the
easy-chairs comfortably about the hearth.

Colville and Mrs. Bowen suddenly found themselves upon those terms which
often succeed a long separation with people who have felt kindly toward
each other at a former meeting and have parted friends: they were much
more intimate than they had supposed themselves to be, or had really any
reason for being.

"Which one of your guests do you wish me to offer up, Mrs. Bowen?" he
asked, from the hollow of the arm-chair, not too low, which he had sunk
into. With Mrs. Bowen in a higher chair at his right hand, and Miss
Graham intent upon him from the sofa on his left, a sense of delicious
satisfaction filled him from head to foot. "There isn't one I would
spare if you said the word."

"And there isn't one I want destroyed, I'm sorry to say," answered Mrs.
Bowen. "Don't you think they were all very agreeable?"

"Yes, yes; agreeable enough--agreeable enough, I suppose. But they
stayed too long. When I think we might have been sitting here for the
last half-hour, if they'd only gone sooner, I find it pretty hard to
forgive them."

Mrs. Bowen and Miss Graham exchanged glances above his head--a glance
which demanded, "Didn't I tell you?" for a glance that answered, "Oh, he
_is_!" Effie Bowen's eyes widened; she kept them fastened upon Colville
in silent worship.

He asked who were certain of the company that he had noticed, and Mrs.
Bowen let him make a little fun of them: the fun was very good-natured.
He repeated what the German had said about the worldly ambition of
American girls; but she would not allow him so great latitude in this.
She said they were no worldlier than other girls. Of course, they were
fond of society, and some of them got a little spoiled. But they were in
no danger of becoming too conventional.

Colville did not insist. "I missed the military to-night, Mrs. Bowen,"
he said. "I thought one couldn't get through an evening in Florence
without officers?"

"We have them when there is dancing," returned Mrs. Bowen.

"Yes, but they don't know anything but dancing," Miss Graham broke in.
"I like some one who can talk something besides compliments."

"You are very peculiar, you know, Imogene," urged Mrs. Bowen gently. "I
don't think our young men at home do much better in conversation, if you
come to that, though."

"Oh, _young_ men, yes! They're the same everywhere. But here, even when
they're away along in the thirties, they think that girls can only enjoy
flattery. _I_ should like a gentleman to talk to me without a single
word or look to show that he thought I was good-looking."

"Ah, how could he be?" Colville insinuated, and the young girl coloured.

"I mean, if I were pretty. This everlasting adulation is insulting."

"Mr. Morton doesn't flatter," said Mrs. Bowen thoughtfully, turning the
feather screen she held at her face, now edgewise, now flatwise, toward
Colville.

"Oh no," owned Miss Graham. "He's a clergyman."

Mrs. Bowen addressed herself to Colville. "You must go to hear him some
day. He's very interesting, if you don't mind his being rather Low
Church."

Colville was going to pretend to an advanced degree of ritualism; but it
occurred to him that it might be a serious matter to Mrs. Bowen, and he
asked instead who was the Rev. Mr. Waters.

"Oh, isn't he lovely?" cried Miss Graham. "There, Mrs. Bowen! Mr.
Waters's manner is what I call _truly_ complimentary. He always talks to
you as if he expected you to be interested in serious matters, and as if
you were his intellectual equal. And he's so _happy_ here in Florence!
He gives you the impression of feeling every breath he breathes here a
privilege. You ought to hear him talk about Savonarola, Mr. Colville."

"Well," said Colville, "I've heard a great many people talk about
Savonarola, and I'm rather glad he talked to me about American girls."

"American girls!" uttered Miss Graham, in a little scream. "Did Mr.
Waters talk to you about _girls_?"

"Yes. Why not? He was probably in love with one once."

"Mr. Waters?" cried the girl. "What nonsense!"

"Well, then, with some old lady. Would you like that better?"

Miss Graham looked at Mrs. Bowen for permission, as it seemed, and then
laughed, but did not attempt any reply to Colville.

"You find even that incredible of such pyramidal antiquity," he resumed.
"Well, it _is_ hard to believe. I told him what that German said, and we
agreed beautifully about another type of American girl which we said we
preferred."

"Oh! What could it be?" demanded Miss Graham.

"Ah, it wouldn't be so easy to say right off-hand," answered Colville
indolently.

Mrs. Bowen put her hand under the elbow of the arm holding her screen.
"I don't believe I should agree with you so well," she said, apparently
with a sort of didactic intention.

They entered into a discussion which is always fruitful with
Americans--the discussion of American girlhood, and Colville contended
for the old national ideal of girlish liberty as wide as the continent,
as fast as the Mississippi. Mrs. Bowen withstood him with delicate
firmness. "Oh," he said, "you're Europeanised."

"I certainly prefer the European plan of bringing up girls," she replied
steadfastly. "I shouldn't think of letting a daughter of mine have the
freedom I had."

"Well, perhaps it will come right in the next generation, then; she will
let her daughter have the freedom she hadn't."

"Not if I'm alive to prevent it," cried Mrs. Bowen.

Colville laughed. "Which plan do you prefer, Miss Graham?"

"I don't think it's quite the same now as it used to be," answered the
girl evasively.

"Well, then, all I can say is that if I had died before this chance, I
had lived a blessed time. I perceive more and more that I'm obsolete.
I'm in my dotage; I prattle of the good old times, and the new spirit of
the age flouts me. Miss Effie, do you prefer the Amer----"

"No, thank you," said her mother quickly.

"Effie is out of the question. It's time you were in bed, Effie."

The child came with instant submissiveness and kissed her mother
good-night; she kissed Miss Graham, and gave her hand to Colville. He
held it a moment, letting her pull shyly away from him, while he lolled
back in his chair, and laughed at her with his sad eyes. "It's past the
time _I_ should be in bed, my dear, and I'm sitting up merely because
there's nobody to send me. It's not that I'm really such a very bad boy.
Good night. Don't put me into a disagreeable dream; put me into a nice
one." The child bridled at the mild pleasantry, and when Colville
released her hand she suddenly stooped forward and kissed him.

"You're so _funny_!" she cried, and ran and escaped beyond the
_portière_.

Mrs. Bowen stared in the same direction, but not with severity. "Really,
Effie has been carried a little beyond herself."

"Well," said Colville, "that's _one_ conquest since I came to Florence.
And merely by being funny! When I was in Florence before, Mrs. Bowen,"
he continued, after a moment, "there were two ladies here, and I used to
go about quite freely with either of them. They were both very pretty,
and we were all very young. Don't you think it was charming?" Mrs. Bowen
coloured a lovely red, and smiled, but made no other response. "Florence
has changed very much for the worse since that time. There used to be a
pretty flower-girl, with a wide-flapping straw hat, who flung a heavy
bough full of roses into my lap when she met me driving across the
Carraja bridge. I spent an hour looking for that girl to-day, and
couldn't find her. The only flower-girl I could find was a fat one of
fifty, who kept me fifteen minutes in Via Tornabuoni while she was
fumbling away at my button-hole, trying to poke three second-hand
violets and a sickly daisy into it. Ah, youth! youth! I suppose a young
fellow could have found that other flower-girl at a glance; but _my_ old
eyes! No, we belong, each of us, to our own generation. Mrs. Bowen," he
said, with a touch of tragedy--whether real or affected, he did not well
know himself--in his hardiness, "what has become of Mrs. Pilsbury?"

"Mrs. Milbury, you mean?" gasped Mrs. Bowen, in affright at his
boldness.

"Milbury, Bilbury, Pilsbury--it's all one, so long as it isn't----"

"They're living in Chicago!" she hastened to reply, as if she were
afraid he was going to say, "so long as it isn't Colville," and she
could not have borne that.

Colville clasped his hands at the back of his head and looked at Mrs.
Bowen with eyes that let her know that he was perfectly aware she had
been telling Miss Graham of his youthful romance, and that he had now
touched it purposely. "And you wouldn't," he said, as if that were quite
relevant to what they had been talking about--"you wouldn't let Miss
Graham go out walking alone with a dotard like me?"

"Certainly not," said Mrs. Bowen.

Colville got to his feet by a surprising activity. "Good-bye, Miss
Graham." He offered his hand to her with burlesque despair, and then
turned to Mrs. Bowen. "Thank you for _such_ a pleasant evening! What was
your day, did you say?"

"Oh, any day!" said Mrs. Bowen cordially, giving her hand.

"Do you know whom you look like?" he asked, holding it.

"No."

"Lina Ridgely."

The ladies stirred softly in their draperies after he was gone. They
turned and faced the hearth, where a log burned in a bed of hot ashes,
softly purring and ticking to itself, and whilst they stood pressing
their hands against the warm fronts of their dresses, as the fashion of
women is before a fire, the clock on the mantel began to strike twelve.

"Was that her name?" asked Miss Graham, when the clock had had its say.
"Lina Ridgely?"

"No; that was _my_ name," answered Mrs. Bowen.

"Oh yes!" murmured the young girl apologetically.

"She led him on; she certainly encouraged him. It was shocking. He was
quite wild about it."

"She must have been a cruel girl. How _could_ he speak of it so
lightly?"

"It was best to speak of it, and have done with it," said Mrs. Bowen.
"He knew that I must have been telling you something about it."

"Yes. How bold it was! A _young_ man couldn't have done it! Yes, he's
fascinating. But how old and sad he looked, as he lay back there in the
chair!"

"Old? I don't think he looked old. He looked sad. Yes, it's left its
mark on him."

The log burned quite through to its core, and fell asunder, a bristling
mass of embers. They had been looking at it with downcast heads. Now
they lifted their faces, and saw the pity in each other's eyes, and the
beautiful girl impulsively kissed the pretty woman good-night.






V


Colville fell asleep with the flattered sense which abounds in the heart
of a young man after his first successful evening in society, but which
can visit maturer life only upon some such conditions of long exile and
return as had been realised in his. The looks of these two charming
women followed him into his dreams; he knew he must have pleased them,
the dramatic homage of the child was evidence of that; and though it had
been many years since he had found it sufficient cause of happiness to
have pleased a woman, the desire to do so was by no means extinct in
him. The eyes of the girl hovered above him like stars; he felt in their
soft gaze that he was a romance to her young heart, and this made him
laugh; it also made him sigh.

He woke at dawn with a sharp twinge in his shoulder, and he rose to give
himself the pleasure of making his own fire with those fagots of broom
and pine twigs which he had enjoyed the night before, promising himself
to get back into bed when the fire was well going, and sleep late. While
he stood before the open stove, the jangling of a small bell outside
called him to the window, and he saw a procession which had just issued
from the church going to administer the extreme unction to some dying
person across the piazza. The parish priest went first, bearing the
consecrated wafer in its vessel, and at his side an acolyte holding a
yellow silk umbrella over the Eucharist; after them came a number of
_facchini_ in white robes and white hoods that hid their faces; their
tapers burned sallow and lifeless in the new morning light; the bell
jangled dismally.

"They even die dramatically in this country," thought Colville, in whom
the artist was taken with the effectiveness of the spectacle before his
human pity was stirred for the poor soul who was passing. He reproached
himself for that, and instead of getting back to bed, he dressed and
waited for the mature hour which he had ordered his breakfast for. When
it came at last, picturesquely borne on the open hand of Giovanni,
steaming coffee, hot milk, sweet butter in delicate disks, and two white
eggs coyly tucked in the fold of a napkin, and all grouped upon the wide
salver, it brought him a measure of the consolation which good cheer
imparts to the ridiculous human heart even in the house where death is.
But the sad incident tempered his mind with a sort of pensiveness that
lasted throughout the morning, and quite till lunch. He spent the time
in going about the churches; but the sunshine which the day began with
was overcast, as it was the day before, and the churches were rather too
dark and cold in the afternoon. He went to Viesseux's reading-room and
looked over the English papers, which he did not care for much; and he
also made a diligent search of the catalogue for some book about
Florence for little Effie Bowen: he thought he would like to surprise
her mother with his interest in the matter. As the day waned toward
dark, he felt more and more tempted to take her at her word, when she
had said that any day was her day to him, and go to see her. If he had
been a younger man he would have anxiously considered this indulgence
and denied himself, but after forty a man denies himself no reasonable
and harmless indulgence; he has learned by that time that it is a pity
and a folly to do so.

Colville found Mrs. Bowen's room half full of arriving and departing
visitors, and then he remembered that it was this day she had named to
him on the Ponte Vecchio, and when Miss Graham thanked him for coming
his first Thursday, he made a merit of not having forgotten it, and said
he was going to come every Thursday during the winter. Miss Graham drew
him a cup of tea from the Russian samovar which replaces in some
Florentine houses the tea-pot of Occidental civilisation, and Colville
smiled upon it and upon her, bending over the brazen urn with a
flower-like tilt of her beautiful head. She wore an aesthetic dress of
creamy camel's-hair, whose colour pleased the eye as its softness would
have flattered the touch.

"What a very Tourguéneffish effect the samovar gives!" he said, taking a
biscuit from the basket Effie Bowen brought him, shrinking with
redoubled shyness from the eyebrows which he arched at her. "I wonder
you can keep from calling me Fedor Colvillitch. Where is your mother,
Effie Bowenovna?" he asked of the child, with a temptation to say
Imogene Grahamovna.

They both looked mystified, but Miss Graham said, "I'm sorry to say you
won't see Mrs. Bowen today. She has a very bad headache, and has left
Effie and me to receive. We feel very incompetent, but she says it will
do us good."

There were some people there of the night before, and Colville had to
talk to them. One of the ladies asked him if he had met the Inglehart
boys as he came in.

"The Inglehart boys? No. What are the Inglehart boys?"

"They were here all last winter, and they've just got back. It's rather
exciting for Florence." She gave him a rapid sketch of that interesting
exodus of a score of young painters from the art school at Munich, under
the head of the singular and fascinating genius by whose name they
became known. "They had their own school for a while in Munich, and then
they all came down into Italy in a body. They had their studio things
with them, and they travelled third class, and they made the greatest
excitement everywhere, and had the greatest fun. They were a great
sensation in Florence. They went everywhere, and were such favourites. I
hope they are going to stay."

"I hope so too," said Colville. "I should like to see them."

"Dear me!" said the lady, with a glance at the clock. "It's five! I must
be going."

The other ladies went, and Colville approached to take leave, but Miss
Graham detained him.

"What is Tourguéneffish?" she demanded.

"The quality of the great Russian novelist, Tourguéneff," said Colville,
perceiving that she had not heard of him.

"Oh!"

"You ought to read him. The samovar sends up its agreeable odour all
through his books. Read _Lisa_ if you want your heart really broken.

"I'm glad you approve of heart-breaks in books. So many people won't
read anything but cheerful books. It's the only quarrel I have with Mrs.
Bowen. She says there are so many sad things in life that they ought to
be kept out of books."

"Ah, there I perceive a divided duty," said Colville. "I should like to
agree with both of you. But if Mrs. Bowen were here I should remind her
that if there are so many sad things in life that is a very good reason
for putting them in books too."

"Of course I shall tell her what you said."

"Why, I don't object to a certain degree of cheerfulness in books; only
don't carry it too far--that's all."

This made the young girl laugh, and Colville was encouraged to go on. He
told her of the sight he had seen from his window at daybreak, and he
depicted it all very graphically, and made her feel its pathos perhaps
more keenly than he had felt it. "Now, that little incident kept with me
all day, tempering my boisterous joy in the Giottos, and reducing me to
a decent composure in the presence of the Cimabues; and it's pretty hard
to keep from laughing at some of them, don't you think?"

The young people perceived that he was making fun again; but he
continued with an air of greater seriousness. "Don't you see what a very
good thing that was to begin one's day with? Why, even in Santa Croce,
with the thermometer ten degrees below zero in the shade of Alfieri's
monument, I was no gayer than I should have been in a church at home. I
suppose Mrs. Bowen would object to having that procession go by under
one's window in a book; but I can't really see how it would hurt the
reader, or damp his spirits permanently. A wholesome reaction would
ensue, such as you see now in me, whom the thing happened to in real
life."

He stirred his tea, and shook with an inward laugh as he carried it to
his lips.

"Yes," said Miss Graham thoughtfully, and she looked at him searchingly
in the interval of silence that ensued. But she only added, "I wish it
would get warmer in the churches. I've seen hardly anything of them
yet."

"From the way I felt in them to-day," sighed Colville, "I should think
the churches would begin to thaw out about the middle of May. But if one
goes well wrapped up in furs, and has a friend along to rouse him and
keep him walking when he is about to fall into that lethargy which
precedes death by freezing, I think they may be visited even now with
safety. Have you been in Santa Maria Novella yet?"

"No," said Miss Graham, with a shake of the head that expressed her
resolution to speak the whole truth if she died for it, "not even in
Santa Maria Novella."

"What a wonderful old place it is! That curious façade, with the dials
and its layers of black and white marble soaked golden-red in a hundred
thousand sunsets! That exquisite grand portal!" He gesticulated with the
hand that the tea-cup left free, to suggest form and measurement as
artists do. "Then the inside! The great Cimabue, with all that famous
history on its back--the first divine Madonna by the first divine
master, carried through the streets in a triumph of art and religion!
Those frescoes of Ghirlandajo's with real Florentine faces and figures
in them, and all lavished upon the eternal twilight of that choir--but I
suppose that if the full day were let in on them, once, they would
vanish like ghosts at cock-crow! You must be sure to see the Spanish
chapel; and the old cloister itself is such a pathetic place. There's a
boys' school, as well as a military college, in the suppressed convent
now, and the colonnades were full of boys running and screaming and
laughing and making a joyful racket; it was so much more sorrowful than
silence would have been there. One of the little scamps came up to me,
and the young monk that was showing me round, and bobbed us a mocking
bow and bobbed his hat off; then they all burst out laughing again and
raced away, and the monk looked after them and said, so sweetly and
wearily, 'They're at their diversions: we must have patience.' There are
only twelve monks left there; all the rest are scattered and gone." He
gave his cup to Miss Graham for more tea.

"Don't you think," she asked, drawing it from the samovar, "that it is
very sad having the convents suppressed?"

"It was very sad having slavery abolished--for some people," suggested
Colville; he felt the unfairness of the point he had made.

"Yes," sighed Miss Graham.

Colville stood stirring his second cup of tea, when the _portière_
parted, and showed Mrs. Bowen wistfully pausing on the threshold. Her
face was pale, but she looked extremely pretty there.

"Ah, come in, Mrs. Bowen!" he called gaily to her. "I won't give you
away to the other people. A cup of tea will do you good."

"Oh, I'm a great deal better," said Mrs. Bowen, coming forward to give
him her hand. "I heard your voice, and I couldn't resist looking in."

"That was very kind of you," said Colville gratefully: and her eyes met
his in a glance that flushed her face a deep red. "You find me here--_I_
don't know why!--in my character of old family friend, doing my best to
make life a burden to the young ladies."

"I wish you would stay to a family dinner with us," said Mrs. Bowen, and
Miss Graham brightened in cordial support of the hospitality. "Why can't
you?"

"I don't know, unless it's because I'm a humane person, and have some
consideration for your headache."

"Oh, that's all gone," said Mrs. Bowen. "It was one of those convenient
headaches--if you ever had them, you'd know--that go off at sunset."

"But you'd have another to-morrow."

"No, I'm safe for a whole fortnight from another."

"Then you leave me without an excuse, and I was just wishing I had
none," said Colville.

After dinner Mrs. Bowen sent Effie to bed early to make up for the late
hours of the night before, but she sat before the fire with Miss Graham
rather late, talking Colville over, when he was gone.

"He's very puzzling to me," said Miss Graham. "Sometimes you think he's
nothing but an old cynic, from his talk, and then something so sweet and
fresh comes out that you don't know what to do. Don't you think he has
really a very poetical mind, and that he's putting all the rest on?"

"I think he likes to make little effects," said Mrs. Bowen judiciously.
"He always did, rather."

"Why, was he like this when he was young?"

"I don't consider him very old now."

"No, of course not. I meant when you knew him before." Miss Graham had
some needlework in her hand; Mrs. Bowen, who never even pretended to
work at that kind of thing, had nothing in hers but the feather screen.

"He is old, compared with you, Imogene; but you'll find, as you live
along, that your contemporaries are always young. Mr. Colville is very
much improved. He used to be painfully shy, but he put on a bold front,
and now the bold front seems to have become a second nature with him."

"I like it," said Miss Graham, to her needle.

"Yes; but I suspect he's still shy, at heart. He used to be very
sentimental, and was always talking Ruskin. I think if he hadn't talked
Ruskin so much, Jenny Milbury might have treated him better. It was very
priggish in him."

"Oh, I can't imagine Mr. Colville's being priggish!"

"He's very much improved. He used to be quite a sloven in his dress; you
know how very slovenly most American gentlemen are in their dress, at
any rate. I think that influenced her against him too."

"He isn't slovenly now," suggested Miss Graham.

"Oh no; he's quite swell," said Mrs. Bowen, depriving the adjective of
slanginess by the refinement of her tone.

"Well," said Miss Graham, "I don't see how you could have endured her
after that. It was atrocious."

"It was better for her to break with him, if she found out she didn't
love him, than to marry him. That," said Mrs. Bowen, with a depth of
feeling uncommon for her, "would have been a thousand times worse."

"Yes, but she ought to have found out before she led him on so far."

"Sometimes girls can't. They don't know themselves; they think they're
in love when they're not. She was very impulsive, and of course she was
flattered by it; he was so intellectual. But at last she found that she
couldn't bear it, and she had to tell him so."

"Did she ever say why she didn't love him?"

"No; I don't suppose she could. The only thing I remember her saying was
that he was 'too much of a mixture.'"

"What _did_ she mean by that?"

"I don't know exactly."

"Do you think he's insincere?"

"Oh no. Perhaps she meant that he wasn't single-minded."

"Fickle?"

"No. He certainly wasn't that in her case."

"Undecided?"

"He was decided enough with her--at last."

Imogene dropped the hopeless quest, "How can a man ever stand such a
thing?" she sighed.

"He stood it very nobly. That was the best thing about it; he took it in
the most delicate way. She showed me his letter. There wasn't a word or
a hint of reproach in it; he seemed to be anxious about nothing but her
feeling badly for him. Of course he couldn't help showing that he was
mortified for having pursued her with attentions that were disagreeable
to her; but that was delicate too. Yes, it was a very large-minded
letter."

"It was shocking in her to show it."

"It wasn't very nice. But it was a letter that any girl might have been
proud to show."

"Oh, she _couldn't_ have done it to gratify her vanity!"

"Girls are very queer, my dear," said Mrs. Bowen, as if the fact were an
abstraction. She mused upon the flat of her screen, while Miss Graham
plied her needle in silence.

The latter spoke first. "Do you think he was very much broken by it?"

"You never can tell. He went out west then, and there he has stayed ever
since. I suppose his life would have been very different if nothing of
the kind had happened. He had a great deal of talent. I always thought I
should hear of him in some way."

"Well, it was a heartless, shameless thing! I don't see how you can
speak of it so leniently as you do, Mrs. Bowen. It makes all sorts of
coquetry and flirtation more detestable to me than ever. Why, it has
ruined his life!"

"Oh, he was young enough then to outlive it. After all, they were a boy
and girl."

"A boy and girl! How old were they?"

"He must have been twenty-three or four, and she was twenty."

"My age! Do you call that being a girl?"

"She was old enough to know what she was about," said Mrs. Bowen justly.

Imogene fell back in her chair, drawing out her needle the full length
of its thread, and then letting her hand fall. "I don't know. It seems
as if I never should be grown up, or anything but a child. Yes, when I
think of the way young men talk, they do seem boys. Why can't they talk
like Mr. Colville? I wish I could talk like him. It makes you forget how
old and plain he is."

She remained with her eyelids dropped in an absent survey of her sewing,
while Mrs. Bowen regarded her with a look of vexation, impatience,
resentment, on the last refinement of these emotions, which she banished
from her face before Miss Graham looked up and said, with a smile "How
funny it is to see Effie's infatuation with him! She can't take her eyes
off him for a moment, and she follows him round the room so as not to
lose a word he is saying. It was heroic of her to go to bed without a
murmur before he left to-night."

"Yes, she sees that he is good," said Mrs. Bowen.

"Oh, she sees that he's something very much more. Mr. Waters is good."

Miss Graham had the best of the argument, and so Mrs. Bowen did not
reply.

"I feel," continued the young girl, "as if it were almost a shame to
have asked him to go to that silly dancing party with us. It seems as if
we didn't appreciate him. I think we ought to have kept him for high
aesthetic occasions and historical researches."

"Oh, I don't think Mr. Colville was very deeply offended at being asked
to go with us."

"No," said Imogene, with another sigh, "he didn't seem so. I suppose
there's always an undercurrent of sadness--of tragedy--in everything for
him."

"I don't suppose anything of the kind," cried Mrs. Bowen gaily. "He's
had time enough to get over it."

"Do people _ever_ get over such things?"

"Yes--men."

"It must be because he was young, as you say. But if it had happened
_now_?"

"Oh, it _couldn't_ happen now. He's altogether too cool and
calculating."

"Do you think he's cool and calculating?"

"No. He's too old for a broken heart--a new one."

"Mrs. Bowen," demanded the girl solemnly, "could _you_ forgive yourself
for such a thing if you had done it?"

"Yes, perfectly well, if I wasn't in love with him."

"But if you'd made him _think_ you were?" pursued the girl breathlessly.

"If I were a flirt--yes."

"_I_ couldn't," said Imogene, with tragic depth.

"Oh, be done with your intensities, and go to bed, Imogene," said Mrs.
Bowen, giving her a playful push.






VI


It was so long since Colville had been at a dancing party that Mrs.
Bowen's offer to take him to Madame Uccelli's had first struck his sense
of the ludicrous. Then it had begun to flatter him; it implied that he
was still young enough to dance if he would, though he had stipulated
that they were not to expect anything of the kind from him. He liked
also the notion of being seen and accepted in Florentine society as the
old friend of Mrs. Bowen's, for he had not been long in discovering that
her position in Florence was, among the foreign residents, rather
authoritative. She was one of the very few Americans who were asked to
Italian houses, and Italian houses lying even beyond the neutral ground
of English-speaking intermarriages. She was not, of course, asked to the
great Princess Strozzi ball, where the Florentine nobility appeared in
the mediaeval pomp--the veritable costumes--of their ancestors; only a
rich American banking family went, and their distinction was spoken of
under the breath; but any glory short of this was within Mrs. Bowen's
reach. So an old lady who possessed herself of Colville the night before
had told him, celebrating Mrs. Bowen at length, and boasting of her
acceptance among the best English residents, who, next after the
natives, seem to constitute the social ambition of Americans living in
Italian cities.

It interested him to find that some geographical distinctions which are
fading at home had quite disappeared in Florence. When he was there
before, people from quite small towns in the East had made pretty Lina
Ridgely and her friend feel the disadvantage of having come from the
Western side of an imaginary line; he had himself been at the pains
always to let people know, at the American watering-places where he
spent his vacations, that though presently from Des Vaches, Indiana, he
was really born in Rhode Island; but in Florence it was not at all
necessary. He found in Mrs. Bowen's house people from Denver, Chicago,
St. Louis, Boston, New York, and Baltimore, all meeting as of apparently
the same civilisation, and whether Mrs. Bowen's own origin was, like
that of the Etruscan cities, lost in the mists of antiquity, or whether
she had sufficiently atoned for the error of her birth by subsequent
residence in the national capital and prolonged sojourn in New York, it
seemed certainly not to be remembered against her among her Eastern
acquaintance. The time had been when the fact that Miss Graham came from
Buffalo would have gone far to class her with the animal from which her
native city had taken its name; but now it made no difference, unless it
was a difference in her favour. The English spoke with the same vague
respect of Buffalo and of Philadelphia; and to a family of real
Bostonians Colville had the courage to say simply that he lived in Des
Vaches, and not to seek to palliate the truth in any sort. If he wished
to prevaricate at all, it was rather to attribute himself to Mrs.
Bowen's city in Ohio.

She and Miss Graham called for him with her carriage the next night,
when it was time to go to Madame Uccelli's.

"This gives me a very patronised and effeminate feeling," said Colville,
getting into the odorous dark of the carriage, and settling himself upon
the front seat with a skill inspired by his anxiety not to tear any of
the silken spreading white wraps that inundated the whole interior.
"Being come for by ladies!" They both gave some nervous joyful laughs,
as they found his hand in the obscurity, and left the sense of a gloved
pressure upon it. "Is this the way you used to do in Vesprucius, Mrs.
Bowen?"

"Oh no, indeed!" she answered. "The young gentlemen used to find out
whether I was going, and came for me with a hack, and generally, if the
weather was good, we walked home."

"That's the way we still do in Des Vaches. Sometimes, as a tremendous
joke, the ladies come for us in leap-year. How do you go to balls in
Buffalo, Miss Graham? Or, no; I withdraw the embarrassing question."
Some gleams from the street lamps, as they drove along, struck in
through the carriage windows, and flitted over the ladies' faces and
were gone again. "Ah! this is very trying. Couldn't you stop him at the
next corner, and let me see how radiant you ladies really are? I may be
in very great danger; I'd like to know just how much."

"It wouldn't be of any use," cried the young girl gaily. "We're all
wrapped up, and you couldn't form any idea of us. You must wait, and let
us burst upon you when we come out of the dressing-room at Madame
Uccelli's."

"But then it may be too late," he urged. "Is it very far?"

"Yes," said Mrs. Bowen. "It's ridiculously far. It's outside the Roman
Gate. I don't see why people live at that distance."

"In order to give the friends you bring the more pleasure of your
company, Mrs. Bowen."

"Ah! that's very well. But you're not logical."

"No," said Colville; "you can't be logical and complimentary at the same
time. It's too much to ask. How delicious your flowers are!" The ladies
each had a bouquet in her hand, which she was holding in addition to her
fan, the edges of her cloak, and the skirt of her train.

"Yes," said Mrs. Bowen; "we are so much obliged to you for them."

"Why, I sent you _no flowers_," said Colville, startled into untimely
earnest.

"Didn't you?" triumphed Mrs. Bowen. "I thought gentlemen always sent
flowers to ladies when they were going to a ball with them. They used
to, in Columbus."

"And in Buffalo they always do," Miss Graham added.

"Ah! they don't in Des Vaches," said Colville. They tried to mystify him
further about the bouquets; they succeeded in being very gay, and in
making themselves laugh a great deal. Mrs. Bowen was even livelier than
the young girl.

Her carriage was one of the few private equipages that drove up to
Madame Uccelli's door; most people had not even come in a _remise_, but,
after the simple Florentine fashion, had taken the little cabs, which
stretched in a long line up and down the way; the horses had let their
weary heads drop, and were easing their broken knees by extending their
forelegs while they drowsed; the drivers, huddled in their great-coats,
had assembled around the doorway to see the guests alight, with that
amiable, unenvious interest of the Italians in the pleasure of others.
The deep sky glittered with stars; in the corner of the next villa
garden the black plumes of some cypresses blotted out their space among
them.

"_Isn't_ it Florentine?" demanded Mrs. Bowen, giving the hand which
Colville offered in helping her out of the carriage a little vivid
pressure, full of reminiscence and confident sympathy. A flush of youth
warmed his heart; he did not quail even when the porter of the villa
intervened between her and her coachman, whom she was telling when to
come back, and said that the carriages were ordered for three o'clock.

"Did you ever sit up so late as that in Des Vaches?" asked Miss Graham
mischievously.

"Oh yes; I was editor of a morning paper," he explained. But he did not
like the imputation of her question.

Madame Uccelli accepted him most hospitably among her guests when he was
presented. She was an American who had returned with her Italian husband
to Italy, and had long survived him in the villa which he had built with
her money. Such people grow very queer with the lapse of time. Madame
Uccelli's character remained inalienably American, but her manners and
customs had become largely Italian; without having learned the language
thoroughly, she spoke it very fluently, and its idioms marked her
Philadelphia English. Her house was a menagerie of all the
nationalities; she was liked in Italian society, and there were many
Italians; English-speaking Russians abounded; there were many genuine
English, Germans, Scandinavians, Protestant Irish, American Catholics,
and then Americans of all kinds. There was a superstition of her
exclusiveness among her compatriots, but one really met every one there
sooner or later; she was supposed to be a convert to the religion of her
late husband, but no one really knew what religion she was of, probably
not even Madame Uccelli herself. One thing you were sure of at her
house, and that was a substantial supper; it is the example of such
resident foreigners which has corrupted the Florentines, though many
native families still hold out against it.

The dancing was just beginning, and the daughter of Madame Uccelli, who
spoke both English and Italian much better than her mother, came forward
and possessed herself of Miss Graham, after a polite feint of pressing
Mrs. Bowen to let her find a partner for her.

Mrs. Bowen cooed a gracious refusal, telling Fanny Uccelli that she knew
very well that she never danced now. The girl had not much time for
Colville; she welcomed him, but she was full of her business of starting
the dance, and she hurried away without asking him whether she should
introduce him to some lady for the quadrille that was forming. Her
mother, however, asked him if he would not go out and get himself some
tea, and she found a lady to go with him to the supper-room. This lady
had daughters whom apparently she wished to supervise while they were
dancing, and she brought Colville back very soon. He had to stand by the
sofa where she sat till Madame Uccelli found him and introduced him to
another mother of daughters. Later he joined a group formed by the
father of one of the dancers and the non-dancing husband of a dancing
wife. Their conversation was perfunctory; they showed one another that
they had no pleasure in it.

Presently the father went to see how his daughter looked while dancing;
the husband had evidently no such curiosity concerning his wife; and
Colville went with the father, and looked at Miss Graham. She was very
beautiful, and she obeyed the music as if it were her breath; her face
was rapt, intense, full of an unsmiling delight, which shone in her dark
eyes, glowing like low stars. Her _abandon_ interested Colville, and
then awed him; the spectacle of that young, unjaded capacity for
pleasure touched him with a profound sense of loss. Suddenly Imogene
caught sight of him, and with the coming of a second look in her eyes
the light of an exquisite smile flashed over her face. His heart was in
his throat.

"_Your_ daughter?" asked the fond parent at his elbow. "That is mine
yonder in red."

Colville did not answer, nor look at the young lady in red. The dance
was ceasing; the fragments of those kaleidoscopic radiations were
dispersing themselves; the tormented piano was silent.

The officer whom Imogene had danced with brought her to Mrs. Bowen, and
resigned her with the regulation bow, hanging his head down before him
as if submitting his neck to the axe. She put her hand in Colville's
arm, where he stood beside Mrs. Bowen. "Oh, _do_ take me to get
something to eat!"

In the supper-room she devoured salad and ices with a childish joy in
them. The place was jammed, and she laughed from her corner at
Colville's struggles in getting the things for her and bringing them to
her. While she was still in the midst of an ice, the faint note of the
piano sounded. "Oh, they're beginning again. It's the Lancers!" she
said, giving him the plate back. She took his arm again; she almost
pulled him along on their return.

"Why don't _you_ dance?" she demanded mockingly.

"I would if you'd let me dance with you."

"Oh, that's impossible! I'm engaged ever so many deep." She dropped his
arm instantly at sight of a young Englishman who seemed to be looking
for her. This young Englishman had a zeal for dancing that was
unsparing; partners were nothing to him except as a means of dancing;
his manner expressed a supreme contempt for people who made the
slightest mistake, who danced with less science or less conscience than
himself. "I've been looking for you," he said, in a tone of cold rebuke,
without looking at her. "We've been waiting."

Colville wished to beat him, but Imogene took his rebuke meekly, and
murmured some apologies about not hearing the piano before. He hurried
her off without recognising Colville's existence in any way.

The undancing husband of the dancing wife was boring himself in a
corner; Colville decided that the chances with him were better than with
the fond father, and joined him, just as a polite officer came up and
entreated him to complete a set. "Oh, I never danced in my life," he
replied; and then he referred the officer to Colville. "Don't _you_
dance?"

"I used to dance," Colville began, while the officer stood looking
patiently at him. This was true. He used to dance the Lancers, too, and
very badly, seventeen years before. He had danced it with Lina Ridgely
and the other one, Mrs. Milbury. His glance wandered to the vacant place
on the floor; it was the same set which Miss Graham was in; she smiled
and beckoned derisively. A vain and foolish ambition fired him. "Oh yes,
I can dance a little," he said.

A little was quite enough for the eager officer. He had Colville a
partner in an instant, and the next he was on the floor.

"Oh, what fun!" cried Miss Graham; but the fun had not really begun yet.

Colville had forgotten everything about the Lancers. He walked round
like a bear in a pen: he capered to and fro with a futile absurdity;
people poked him hither and thither; his progress was attended by
rending noises from the trains over which he found his path. He smiled
and cringed, and apologised to the hardening faces of the dancers: even
Miss Graham's face had become very grave.

"This won't do," said the Englishman at last, with cold insolence. He
did not address himself to any one; he merely stopped; they all stopped,
and Colville was effectively expelled the set; another partner was found
for his lady, and he wandered giddily away. He did not know where to
turn; the whole room must have seen what an incredible ass he had made
of himself, but Mrs. Bowen looked as if she had not seen.

He went up to her, resolved to make fun of himself at the first sign she
gave of being privy to his disgrace. But she only said, "Have you found
your way to the supper-room yet?"

"Oh yes; twice," he answered, and kept on talking with her and Madame
Uccelli. After five minutes or so something occurred to Colville. "Have
_you_ found the way to the supper-room yet, Mrs. Bowen?"

"No!" she owned, with a small, pathetic laugh, which expressed a certain
physical faintness, and reproached him with insupportable gentleness for
his selfish obtuseness.

"Let me show you the way," he cried.

"Why, I _am_ rather hungry," said Mrs. Bowen, taking his arm, with a
patient arrangement first of her fan, her bouquet, and her train, and
then moving along by his side with a delicate footed pace, which
insinuated and deprecated her dependence upon him.

There were only a few people in the supper-room, and they had it
practically to themselves. She took a cup of tea and a slice of buttered
bread, with a little salad, which she excused herself from eating
because it was the day after her headache. "I shouldn't have thought you
_were_ hungry, Mrs. Bowen," he said, "if you hadn't told me so," and he
recalled that, as a young girl, her friend used to laugh at her for
having such a butterfly appetite; she was in fact one of those women who
go through life the marvels of such of our brutal sex as observe the
ethereal nature of their diet. But in an illogical revulsion of feeling.
Colville, who was again cramming himself with all the solids and fluids
in reach, and storing up a vain regret against the morrow, preferred her
delicacy to the magnificent rapacity of Miss Graham: Imogene had passed
from salad to ice, and at his suggestion had frankly reverted to salad
again and then taken a second ice, with the robust appetite of perfect
health and perfect youth. He felt a desire to speak against her to Mrs.
Bowen, he did not know why and he did not know how; he veiled his
feeling in an open attack. "Miss Graham has just been the cause of my
playing the fool, with her dancing. She dances so superbly that she
makes you want to dance too--she made me feel as if I _could_ dance."

"Yes," said Mrs. Bowen; "it was very kind of you to complete the set. I
saw you dancing," she added, without a glimmer of guilty consciousness
in her eyes.

It was very sweet, but Colville had to protest. "Oh no; you didn't see
me _dancing_; you saw me _not dancing_. I am a ruined man, and I leave
Florence to-morrow; but I have the sad satisfaction of reflecting that I
don't leave an unbroken train among the ladies of that set. And I have
made one young Englishman so mad that there is a reasonable hope of his
not recovering."

"Oh no; you _don't_ think of going away for that!" said Mrs. Bowen, not
heeding the rest of his joking.

"Well, the time has been when I have left Florence for loss," said
Colville, with the air of preparing himself to listen to reason.

"You mustn't," said Mrs. Bowen briefly.

"Oh, very well, then, I won't," said Colville whimsically, as if that
settled it.

Mrs. Bowen would not talk of the matter any more; he could see that with
her kindness, which was always more than her tact, she was striving to
get away from the subject. As he really cared for it no longer, this
made him persist in clinging to it; he liked this pretty woman's being
kind to him. "Well," he said finally, "I consent to stay in Florence on
condition that you suggest some means of atonement for me which I can
also make a punishment to Miss Graham."

Mrs. Bowen did not respond to the question of placating and punishing
her _protégée_ with sustained interest. They went back to Madame
Uccelli, and to the other elderly ladies in the room that opened by
archways upon the dancing-room.

Imogene was on the floor, dancing not merely with unabated joy, but with
a zest that seemed only to freshen from dance to dance. If she left the
dance, it was to go out on her partner's arm to the supper-room.
Colville could not decently keep on talking to Mrs. Bowen the whole
evening; it would be too conspicuous; he devolved from frump to frump;
he bored himself; he yawned in his passage from one of these mothers or
fathers to another. The hours passed; it was two o'clock; Imogene was
going out to the supper-room again. He was taking out his watch. She saw
him, and "Oh, don't!" she cried, laughing, as she passed.

The dancing went on; she was waltzing now in the interminable german.
Some one had let down, a window in the dancing-room, and he was feeling
it in his shoulder. Mrs. Bowen, across the room, looked heroically
patient, but weary. He glanced, down at the frump on the sofa near, and
realised that she had been making a long speech to him, which, he could
see from her look, had ended in some sort of question.

Three o'clock came, and they had to wait till the german was over. He
felt that Miss Graham was behaving badly, ungratefully, selfishly; on
the way home in the carriage he was silent from utter boredom and
fatigue, but Mrs. Bowen was sweetly sympathetic with the girl's rapture.
Imogene did not seem to feel his moodiness; she laughed, she joked, she
told a number of things that happened, she hummed the air of the last
waltz. "Isn't it divine?" she asked. "Oh! I feel as if I could dance for
a week." She was still dancing; she gave Colville's foot an accidental
tap in keeping time on the floor of the carriage to the tune she was
humming. No one said anything about a next meeting when they parted at
the gate of Palazzo Pinti, and Mrs. Bowen bade her coachman drive
Colville to his hotel. But both the ladies' voices called good-night to
him as he drove away. He fancied a shade of mocking in Miss Graham's
voice.

The great outer door of the hotel was locked, of course, and the poor
little porter kept Colville thumping at it some time before he unlocked
it, full of sleepy smiles and apologies. "I'm sorry to wake you up,"
said Colville kindly.

"It is my duty," said the porter, with amiable heroism. He discharged
another duty by lighting a whole new candle, which would be set down to
Colville's account, and went before him to his room, up the wide stairs,
cold in their white linen path, and on through the crooked corridors
haunted by the ghosts of extinct _tables d'hôte_, and full of goblin
shadows. He had recovered a noonday suavity by the time he reached
Colville's door, and bowed himself out, after lighting the candles
within, with a sweet plenitude of politeness, which Colville, even in
his gloomy mood, could not help admiring in a man in his shirt sleeves,
with only one suspender up.

If there had been a fire, Colville would have liked to sit down before
it, and take an account of his feelings, but the atmosphere of a
bed-chamber in a Florentine hotel at half-past three o'clock on a winter
morning is not one that invites to meditation; and he made haste to get
into bed, with nothing clearer in his mind than a shapeless sense of
having been trifled with. He ought not to have gone to a dancing party,
to begin with, and then he certainly ought not to have attempted to
dance; so far he might have been master of the situation, and was
responsible for it; but he was, over and above this, aware of not having
wished to do either, of having been wrought upon against his convictions
to do both. He regarded now with supreme loathing a fantastic purpose
which he had formed while tramping round on those women's dresses, of
privately taking lessons in dancing, and astonishing Miss Graham at the
next ball where they met. Miss Graham? What did he care for that child?
Or Mrs. Bowen either, for the matter of that? Had he come four thousand
miles to be used, to be played with, by them? At this point Colville was
aware of the brutal injustice of his mood. They were ladies, both of
them, charming and good, and he had been a fool; that was all. It was
not the first time he had been a fool for women. An inexpressible
bitterness for that old wrong, which, however he had been used to laugh
at it and despise it, had made his life solitary and barren, poured upon
his soul; it was as if it had happened to him yesterday.

A band of young men burst from one of the narrow streets leading into
the piazza and straggled across it, letting their voices flare out upon
the silence, and then drop extinct one by one. A whole world of faded
associations flushed again in Colville's heart. This was Italy; this was
Florence; and he execrated the hour in which he had dreamed of
returning.






VII


The next morning's sunshine dispersed the black mood of the night
before; but enough of Colville's self-disgust remained to determine him
not to let his return to Florence be altogether vain, or his sojourn so
idle as it had begun being. The vague purpose which he had cherished of
studying the past life and character of the Florentines in their
architecture shaped itself anew in the half-hour which he gave himself
over his coffee; and he turned it over in his mind with that mounting
joy in its capabilities which attends the contemplation of any sort of
artistic endeavour. No people had ever more distinctly left the impress
of their whole temper in their architecture, or more sharply
distinguished their varying moods from period to period in their palaces
and temples. He believed that he could not only supply that brief
historical sketch of Florence which Mrs. Bowen had lamented the want of,
but he could make her history speak an unintelligible, an unmistakeable
tongue in every monument of the past, from the Etruscan wall at Fiesole
to the cheap, plain, and tasteless shaft raised to commemorate Italian
Unity in the next piazza. With sketches from his own pencil,
illustrative of points which he could not otherwise enforce, he could
make such a book on Florence as did not exist, such a book as no one had
yet thought of making. With this object in his mind, making and keeping
him young, he could laugh with any one who liked at the vanity of the
middle-aged Hoosier who had spoiled a set in the Lancers at Madame
Uccelli's party; he laughed at him now alone, with a wholly impersonal
sense of his absurdity.

After breakfast he went without delay to Viesseux's reading-room, to
examine his catalogue, and see what there was in it to his purpose.
While he was waiting his turn to pay his subscription, with the people
who surrounded the proprietor, half a dozen of the acquaintances he had
made at Mrs. Bowen's passed in and out. Viesseux's is a place where
sooner or later you meet every one you know among the foreign residents
at Florence; the natives in smaller proportion resort there too; and
Colville heard a lady asking for a book in that perfect Italian which
strikes envy to the heart of the stranger sufficiently versed in the
language to know that he never shall master it. He rather rejoiced in
his despair, however, as an earnest of his renewed intellectual life.
Henceforth his life would be wholly intellectual. He did not regret his
little excursion into society; it had shown him with dramatic sharpness
how unfit for it he was.

"Good _morning_!" said some one in a bland undertone full of a pleasant
recognition of the claims to quiet of a place where some others were
speaking in their ordinary tones.

Colville looked round on the Rev. Mr. Waters, and took his friendly
hand. "Good morning--glad to see you," he answered.

"Are you looking for that short Florentine history for Mrs. Bowen's
little girl?" asked Mr. Waters, inclining his head slightly for the
reply. "She mentioned it to me."

By day Colville remarked more distinctly that the old gentleman was
short and slight, with a youthful eagerness in his face surviving on
good terms with the grey locks that fell down his temples from under the
brim of his soft felt hat. With the boyish sweetness of his looks
blended a sort of appreciative shrewdness, which pointed his smiling
lips slightly aslant in what seemed the expectation rather than the
intention of humour.

"Not exactly," said Colville, experiencing a difficulty in withholding
the fact that in some sort he was just going to write a short Florentine
history, and finding a certain pleasure in Mrs. Bowen's having
remembered that he had taken an interest in Effie's reading. He had a
sudden wish to tell Mr. Waters of his plan, but this was hardly the time
or place.

They now found themselves face to face with the librarian, and Mr.
Waters made a gesture of waiving himself in Colville's favour.

"No, no!" said the latter; "you had better ask. I am going to put this
gentleman through rather an extended course of sprouts."

The librarian smiled with the helplessness of a foreigner, who knows his
interlocutor's English, but not the meaning of it.

"Oh, I merely wanted to ask," said Mr. Waters, addressing the librarian,
and explaining to Colville, "whether you had received that book on
Savonarola yet. The German one."

"I shall see," said the librarian, and he went upon a quest that kept
him some minutes.

"You're not thinking of taking Savonarola's life, I suppose?" suggested
Colville.

"Oh no. Villari's book has covered the whole ground for ever, it seems
to me. It's a wonderful book. You've read it?"

"Yes. It's a thing that makes you feel that, after all, the Italians
have only to make a real effort in any direction, and they go ahead of
everybody else. What biography of the last twenty years can compare with
it?"

"You're right, sir--you're right," cried the old man enthusiastically.
"They're a gifted race, a people of genius."

"I wish for their own sakes they'd give their minds a little to
generalship," said Colville, pressed by the facts to hedge somewhat.
"They did get so badly smashed in their last war, poor fellows."

"Oh, I don't think I should like them any better if they were better
soldiers. Perhaps the lesson of noble endurance that they've given our
times is all that we have the right to demand of them in the way of
heroism; no one can say they lack courage. And sometimes it seems to me
that in simply outgrowing the different sorts of despotism that had
fastened upon them, till their broken bonds fell away without positive
effort on their part, they showed a greater sublimity than if they had
violently conquered their freedom. Most nations sink lower and lower
under tyranny; the Italians grew steadily more and more civilised, more
noble, more gentle, more grand. It was a wonderful spectacle--like a
human soul perfected through suffering and privation. Every period of
their history is full of instruction. I find my ancestral puritanism
particularly appealed to by the puritanism of Savonarola."

"Then Villari hasn't satisfied you that Savonarola wasn't a Protestant?"

"Oh yes, he has. I said his puritanism. Just now I'm interested in
justifying his failure to myself, for it's one of the things in history
that I've found it hardest to accept. But no doubt his puritanic state
fell because it was dreary and ugly, as the puritanic state always has
been. It makes its own virtues intolerable; puritanism won't let you see
how good and beautiful the Puritans often are. It was inevitable that
Savonarola's enemies should misunderstand and hate him."

"You are one of the last men I should have expected to find among the
_Arrabiati_," said Colville.

"Oh, there's a great deal to be said for the Florentine Arrabiati, as
well as for the English Malignants, though the Puritans in neither case
would have known how to say it. Savonarola perished because he was
excessive. I am studying him in this aspect; it is fresh ground. It is
very interesting to inquire just at what point a man's virtues become
mischievous and intolerable."

These ideas interested Colville; he turned to them with relief from the
sense of his recent trivialities; in this old man's earnestness he found
support and encouragement in the new course he had marked out for
himself. Sometimes it had occurred to him not only that he was too old
for the interests of his youth at forty, but that there was no longer
time for him to take up new ones. He considered Mr. Waters's grey hairs,
and determined to be wiser. "I should like to talk these things over
with you--and some other things," he said.

The librarian came toward them with the book for Mr. Waters, who was
fumbling near-sightedly in his pocket-book for his card. "I shall be
very happy to see you at my room," he said. "Ah, thank you," he added,
taking his book, with a simple relish as if it were something whose
pleasantness was sensible to the touch. He gave Colville the scholar's
far-off look as he turned to go: he was already as remote as the
fifteenth century through the magic of the book, which he opened and
began to read at once. Colville stared after him; he did not wish to
come to just that yet, either. Life, active life, life of his own day,
called to him; he had been one of its busiest children: could he turn
his back upon it for any charm or use that was in the past? Again that
unnerving doubt, that paralysing distrust, beset him, and tempted him to
curse the day in which he had returned to this outworn Old World. Idler
on its modern surface, or delver in its deep-hearted past, could he
reconcile himself to it? What did he care for the Italians of to-day, or
the history of the Florentines as expressed in their architectural
monuments? It was the problems of the vast, tumultuous American life,
which he had turned his back on, that really concerned him. Later he
might take up the study that fascinated yonder old man, but for the
present it was intolerable.

He was no longer young, that was true; but with an ache of old regret he
felt that he had not yet lived his life, that his was a baffled destiny,
an arrested fate. A lady came up and took his turn with the librarian,
and Colville did not stay for another. He went out and walked down the
Lung' Arno toward the Cascine. The sun danced on the river, and bathed
the long line of pale buff and grey houses that followed its curve, and
ceased in the mist of leafless tree-tops where the Cascine began. It was
not the hour of the promenade, and there was little driving; but the
sidewalks were peopled thickly enough with persons, in groups, or
singly, who had the air of straying aimlessly up or down, with no
purpose but to be in the sun, after the rainy weather of the past week.
There were faces of invalids, wistful and thin, and here and there a
man, muffled to the chin, lounged feebly on the parapet and stared at
the river. Colville hastened by them; they seemed to claim him as one of
their ailing and aging company, and just then he was in the humour of
being very young and strong.

A carriage passed before him through the Cascine gates, and drove down
the road next the river. He followed, and when it had got a little way
it stopped at the roadside, and a lady and little girl alighted, who
looked about and caught sight of him, and then obviously waited for him
to come up with them. It was Imogene and Effie Bowen, and the young girl
called to him: "We _thought_ it was you. Aren't you astonished to find
us here at this hour?" she demanded, as soon as he came up, and gave him
her hand. "Mrs. Bowen sent us for our health--or Effie's health--and I
was just making the man stop and let us out for a little walk."

"My health is very much broken too, Miss Effie," said Colville. "Will
you let me walk with you?" The child smiled, as she did at Colville's
speeches, which she apparently considered all jokes, but diplomatically
referred the decision to Imogene with an upward glance.

"We shall be very glad indeed," said the girl.

"That's very polite of you. But Miss Effie makes no effort to conceal
her dismay," said Colville.

The little girl smiled again, and her smile was so like the smile of
Lina Ridgely, twenty years ago, that his next words were inevitably
tinged with reminiscence.

"Does one still come for one's health to the Cascine? When I was in
Florence before, there was no other place if one went to look for it
with young ladies--the Cascine or the Boboli Gardens. Do they keep the
fountain of youth turned on here during the winter still?"

"I've never seen it," said Imogene gaily.

"Of course not. You never looked for it. Neither did I when I was here
before. But it wouldn't escape me now."

Since he had met them he had aged again, in spite of his resolutions to
the contrary; somehow, beside their buoyancy and bloom, the youth in his
heart faded.

Imogene had started forward as soon as he joined them, and Colville,
with Effie's gloved hand stolen shyly in his, was finding it quite
enough to keep up with her in her elastic advance.

She wore a long habit of silk, whose fur-trimmed edge wandered
diagonally across her breast and down to the edge of her walking dress.
To Colville, whom her girlish slimness in her ball costume had puzzled
after his original impressions of Junonian abundance, she did not so
much dwindle as seem to vanish from the proportions his visions had
assigned her that first night when he saw her standing before the
mirror. In this outdoor avatar, this companionship with the sun and
breeze, she was new to him again, and he found himself searching his
consciousness for his lost acquaintance with her, and feeling as if he
knew her less and less. Perhaps, indeed, she had no very distinctive
individuality; perhaps at her age no woman has, but waits for it to come
to her through life, through experience. She was an expression of youth,
of health, of beauty, and of the moral loveliness that comes from a
fortunate combination of these; but beyond this she was elusive in a way
that seemed to characterise her even materially. He could not make
anything more of the mystery as he walked at her side, and he went
thinking--formlessly, as people always think--that with the child or
with her mother he would have had a community of interest and feeling
which he lacked with this splendid girlhood! he was both too young and
too old for it; and then, while he answered this or that to Imogene's
talk aptly enough, his mind went back to the time when this mystery was
no mystery, or when he was contemporary with it, and if he did not
understand it, at least accepted it as if it wore the most natural thing
in the world. It seemed a longer time now since it had been in his world
than it was since he was a child.

"Should you have thought," she asked, turning her face back toward him,
"that it would be so hot in the sun to-day? _Oh_, that beautiful river!
How it twists and writhes along! Do you remember that sonnet of
Longfellow's--the one he wrote in Italian about the Ponte Vecchio, and
the Arno twisting like a dragon underneath it? They say that Hawthorne
used to live in a villa just behind the hill over there; we're going to
look it up as soon as the weather is settled. Don't you think his books
are perfectly fascinating?"

"Yes," said Colville; "only I should want a good while to say it."

"_I_ shouldn't!" retorted the girl. "When you've said fascinating,
you've said everything. There's no other word for them. Don't you like
to talk about the books you've read?"

"I would if I could remember the names of the characters. But I get them
mixed up."

"Oh, _I_ never do! I remember the least one of them, and all they do and
say."

"I used to."

"It seems to me you _used_ to do everything."

"It seems to me as if I did."

  "'I remember, when I think,
   That my youth was half divine.'"


"Oh, Tennyson--yes! _He's_ fascinating. Don't you think he's
fascinating?"

"Very," said Colville. He was wondering whether this were the kind of
talk that he thought was literary when he was a young fellow.

"How perfectly weird the 'Vision of Sin' is!" Imogene continued. "Don't
you like _weird_ things?"

"Weird things?" Colville reflected. "Yes; but I don't see very much in
them any more. The fact is, they don't seem to come to anything in
particular."

"Oh, _I_ think they do! I've had dreams that I've lived on for days. Do
you ever have prophetic dreams?"

"Yes; but they never come true. When they do, I know that I didn't have
them."

"What _do_ you mean?"

"I mean that we are all so fond of the marvellous that we can't trust
ourselves about any experience that seems supernatural. If a ghost
appeared to me I should want him to prove it by at least two other
reliable, disinterested witnesses before I believed my own account of
the matter."

"Oh!" cried the girl, half puzzled, half amused. "Then of course you
don't believe in ghosts?"

"Yes; I expect to be one myself some day. But I'm in no hurry to mingle
with them."

Imogene smiled vaguely, as if the talk pleased her, even when it mocked
the fancies and whims which, after so many generations that have
indulged them, she was finding so fresh and new in her turn.

"Don't you like to walk by the side of a river?" she asked, increasing
her eager pace a little. "I feel as if it were bearing me along."

"I feel as if I were carrying it," said Colville. "It's as fatiguing as
walking on railroad ties."

"Oh, that's too bad!" cried the girl. "How can you be so prosaic? Should
you ever have believed that the sun could be so hot in January? And look
at those ridiculous green hillsides over the river there! Don't you like
it to be winter when it _is_ winter?"

She did not seem to have expected anything from Colville but an
impulsive acquiescence, but she listened while he defended the mild
weather. "I think it's very well for Italy," he said. "It has always
seemed to me--that is, it seems to me now for the first time, but one
has to begin the other way--as if the seasons here had worn themselves
out like the turbulent passions of the people. I dare say the winter was
much fiercer in the times of the Bianchi and Neri."

"Oh, how delightful! Do you really believe that?"

"No, I don't know that I do. But I shouldn't have much difficulty in
proving it, I think, to the sympathetic understanding."

"I wish you would prove it to mine. It sounds so pretty, I'm sure it
must be true."

"Oh, then, it isn't necessary. I'll reserve my arguments for Mrs.
Bowen."

"You had better. She isn't at all romantic. She says it's very well for
me she isn't--that her being matter-of-fact lets me be as romantic as I
like."

"Then Mrs. Bowen isn't as romantic as she would like to be if she hadn't
charge of a romantic young lady?"

"Oh, I don't say that. Dear me! I'd no idea it _could_ be so hot in
January." As they strolled along beside the long hedge of laurel, the
carriage slowly following them at a little distance, the sun beat strong
upon the white road, blotched here and there with the black irregular
shadows of the ilexes. The girl undid the pelisse across her breast,
with a fine impetuosity, and let it swing open as she walked. She
stopped suddenly. "Hark! What bird was that?"

"'It was the nightingale, and not the lark,'" suggested Colville lazily.

"Oh, _don't_ you think _Romeo and Juliet_ is divine?" demanded Imogene,
promptly dropping the question of the bird.

"I don't know about Romeo," returned Colville, "but it's sometimes
occurred to me that Juliet was rather forth-putting."

"You _know_ she wasn't. It's my favourite play. I could go every night.
It's perfectly amazing to me that they can play anything else."

"You would like it five hundred nights in the year, like _Hazel Kirke_?
That would be a good deal of Romeo, not to say Juliet."

"They ought to do it out of respect to Shakespeare. Don't you like
Shakespeare?"

"Well, I've seen the time when I preferred Alexander Smith," said
Colville evasively.

"Alexander Smith? Who in the world is Alexander Smith?"

"How recent you are! Alexander Smith was an immortal who flourished
about the year 1850."

"That was before I was born. How could I remember him? But I don't feel
so very recent for all that."

"Neither do I, this morning," said Colville. "I was up at one of
Pharaoh's balls last night, and I danced too much."

He gave Imogene a droll glance, and then bent it upon Effie's discreet
face. The child dropped her eyes with a blush like her mother's, having
first sought provisional counsel of Imogene, who turned away. He rightly
inferred that they all had been talking him over at breakfast, and he
broke into a laugh which they joined in, but Imogene said nothing in
recognition of the fact.

With what he felt to be haste for his relief she said, "Don't you hate
to be told to read a book?"

"I used to--quarter of a century ago," said Colville, recognising that
this was the way young people talked, even then.

"Used to?" she repeated. "Don't you now?"

"No; I'm a great deal more tractable now. I always say that I shall get
the book out of the library. I draw the line at buying. I still hate to
buy a book that people recommend."

"What kind of books do you like to buy?"

"Oh, no kind. I think we ought to get all our books out of the library."

"Do you never like to talk in earnest?"

"Well, not often," said Colville. "Because, if you do, you can't say
with a good conscience afterward that you were only in fun."

"Oh! And do you always like to talk so that you can get out of things
afterward?"

"No. I didn't say that, did I?"

"Very nearly, I should think."

"Then I'm glad I didn't quite."

"I like people to be outspoken--to say everything they think," said the
girl, regarding him with a puzzled look.

"Then I foresee that I shall become a favourite," answered Colville. "I
say a great deal more than I think."

She looked at him again with envy, with admiration, qualifying her
perplexity. They had come to a point where some moss-grown,
weather-beaten statues stood at the corners of the road that traversed
the bosky stretch between the avenues of the Cascine. "Ah, how beautiful
they are!" he said, halting, and giving himself to the rapture that a
blackened garden statue imparts to one who beholds it from the
vantage-ground of sufficient years and experience.

"Do you remember that story of Heine's," he resumed, after a moment, "of
the boy who steals out of the old castle by moonlight, and kisses the
lips of the garden statue, fallen among the rank grass of the ruinous
parterres? And long afterward, when he looks down on the sleep of the
dying girl where she lies on the green sofa, it seems to him that she
and that statue are the same?"

"Oh!" deeply sighed the young girl. "No, I never read it. Tell me what
it is. I _must_ read it."

"The rest is all talk--very good talk; but I doubt whether it would
interest you. He goes on to talk of a great many things---of the way
Bellini spoke French, for example. He says it was bloodcurdling,
horrible, cataclysmal. He brought out the poor French words and broke
them upon the wheel, till you thought the whole world must give way with
a thunder-crash. A dead hush reigned in the room; the women did not know
whether to faint or fly; the men looked down at their pantaloons, and
tried to realise what they had on."

"Oh, how perfectly delightful! how shameful!" cried the girl. "I _must_
read it. What is it in? What is the name of the story?"

"It isn't a story," said Colville. "Did you ever see anything lovelier
than these statues?"

"No," said Imogene. "_Are_ they good?"

"They are much better than good--they are the very worst rococo."

"What makes you say they are beautiful, then?"

"Why, don't you see? They commemorate youth, gaiety, brilliant, joyous
life. That's what that kind of statues was made for--to look on at rich,
young, beautiful people and their gallantries; to be danced before by
fine ladies and gentlemen playing at shepherd and shepherdesses; to be
driven past by marcheses and contessinas flirting in carriages; to be
hung with scarfs and wreaths; to be parts of eternal _fétes champêtres_.
Don't you see how bored they look? When I first came to Italy I should
have detested and ridiculed their bad art; but now they're
exquisite--the worse, the better."

"I don't know what in the world you _do_ mean," said Imogene, laughing
uneasily.

"Mrs. Bowen would. It's a pity Mrs. Bowen isn't here with us. Miss
Effie, if I lift you up to one of those statues, will you kindly ask it
if it doesn't remember a young American signor who was here just before
the French Revolution? I don't believe it's forgotten me."

"No, no," said Imogene. "It's time we were walking back. Don't you like
Scott!" she added. "I should think you would if you like those romantic
things. I used to like Scott so _much_. When I was fifteen I wouldn't
read anything but Scott. Don't you like Thackeray? Oh, he's so
_cynical_! It's perfectly delightful."

"Cynical?" repeated Colville thoughtfully. "I was looking into _The
Newcomes_ the other day, and I thought he was rather sentimental."

"Sentimental! Why, what an idea! That is the strangest thing I ever
heard of. Oh!" she broke in upon her own amazement, "don't you think
Browning's 'Statue and the Bust' is splendid? Mr. Morton read it to
us--to Mrs. Bowen, I mean."

Colville resented this freedom of Mr. Morton's, he did not know just
why; then his pique was lost in sarcastic recollection of the time when
he too used to read poems to ladies. He had read that poem to Lina
Ridgely and the other one.

"Mrs. Bowen asked him to read it," Imogene continued.

"Did she?" asked Colville pensively.

"And then we discussed it afterward. We had a long discussion. And then
he read us the 'Legend of Pornic,' and we had a discussion about that.
Mrs. Bowen says it was real gold they found in the coffin; but I think
it was the girl's 'gold hair.' I don't know which Mr. Morton thought.
Which do you? Don't you think the 'Legend of Pornic' is splendid?"

"Yes, it's a great poem, and deep," said Colville. They had come to a
place where the bank sloped invitingly to the river. "Miss Effie," he
asked, "wouldn't you like to go down and throw stones into the Arno?
That's what a river is for," he added, as the child glanced toward
Imogene for authorisation, "to have stones thrown into it."

"Oh, let us!" cried Imogene, rushing down to the brink. "I don't want to
throw stones into it, but to get near it--to get near to any bit of
nature. They do pen you up so from it in Europe!" She stood and watched
Colville skim stones over the current. "When you stand by the shore of a
swift river like this, or near a railroad train when it comes whirling
by, don't you ever have a morbid impulse to fling yourself forward?"

"Not at my time of life," said Colville, stooping to select a flat
stone. "Morbid impulses are one of the luxuries of youth." He threw the
stone, which skipped triumphantly far out into the stream. "That was
beautiful, wasn't it, Miss Effie?"

"Lovely!" murmured the child.

He offered her a flat pebble. "Would you like to try one?"

"It would spoil my gloves," she said, in deprecating refusal.

"Let _me_ try it!" cried Imogene. "I'm not afraid of my gloves."

Colville yielded the pebble, looking at her with the thought of how
intoxicating he should once have found this bit of wilful _abandon_, but
feeling rather sorry for it now. "Oh, perhaps not?" he said, laying his
hand upon hers, and looking into her eyes.

She returned his look, and then she dropped the pebble and put her hand
back in her muff, and turned and ran up the bank. "There's the carriage.
It's time we should be going." At the top of the bank she became a
mirror of dignity, a transparent mirror to his eye. "Are you going back
to town, Mr. Colville?" she asked, with formal state. "We could set you
down anywhere!"

"Thank you, Miss Graham. I shall be glad to avail myself of your very
kind offer. Allow me." He handed her ceremoniously to the carriage; he
handed Effie Bowen even more ceremoniously to the carriage, holding his
hat in one hand while he offered the other. Then he mounted to the seat
in front of them. "The weather has changed," he said.

Imogene hid her face in her muff, and Effie Bowen bowed hers against
Imogene's shoulder.

A sense of the girl's beauty lingered in Colville's thought all day, and
recurred to him again and again; and the ambitious intensity and
enthusiasm of her talk came back in touches of amusement and compassion.
How divinely young it all was, and how lovely! He patronised it from a
height far aloof.

He was not in the frame of mind for the hotel table, and he went to
lunch, at a restaurant. He chose a simple trattoria, the first he came
to, and he took his seat at one of the bare, rude tables, where the
joint saucers for pepper and salt, and a small glass for toothpicks,
with a much-scraped porcelain box for matches, expressed an uncorrupted
Florentinity of custom. But when he gave his order in offhand Italian,
the waiter answered in the French which waiters get together for the
traveller's confusion in Italy, and he resigned himself to whatever
chance of acquaintance might befall him. The place had a companionable
smell of stale tobacco, and the dim light showed him on the walls of a
space dropped a step or two lower, at the end of the room, a variety of
sketches and caricatures. A waiter was laying a large table in this
space, and when Colville came up to examine the drawings he jostled him,
with due apologies, in the haste of a man working against time for
masters who will brook no delay. He was hurrying still when a party of
young men came in and took their places at the table, and began to rough
him for his delay. Colville could recognise several of them in the
vigorous burlesques on the walls, and as others dropped in the grotesque
portraitures made him feel as if he had seen them before. They all
talked at once, each man of his own interests, except when they joined
in a shout of mockery and welcome for some new-comer. Colville, at his
_risotto_, almost the room's length away, could hear what they thought,
one and another, of Botticelli and Michelangelo; of old Piloty's things
at Munich; of the dishes they had served to them, and of the quality of
the Chianti; of the respective merits of German and Italian tobacco; of
whether Inglehart had probably got to Venice yet; of the personal habits
of Billings, and of the question whether the want of modelling in
Simmons's nose had anything to do with his style of snoring; of the
overrated colouring of some of those Venetian fellows; of the delicacy
of Mino da Fiesole, and of the genius of Babson's tailor. Babson was
there to defend the cut of his trousers, and Billings and Simmons were
present to answer for themselves at the expense of the pictures of those
who had called their habits and features into question. When it came to
this all the voices joined in jolly uproar. Derision and denial broke
out of the tumult, and presently they were all talking quietly of a
reception which some of them were at the day before. Then Colville heard
one of them saying that he would like a chance to paint some lady whose
name he did not catch, and "She looks awfully sarcastic," one of the
young fellows said.

"They say she _is_," said another. "They say she's awfully
intellectual."

"Boston?" queried a third.

"No, Kalamazoo. The centre of culture is out there now."

"She knows how to dress, anyhow," said the first commentator. "I wonder
what Parker would talk to her about when he was painting her. He's never
read anything but Poe's 'Ullalume.'"

"Well, that's a good subject--'Ullalume.'"

"I suppose she's read it?"

"She's read 'most everything, they say."

"What's an Ullalume, anyway, Parker?"

One of the group sprang up from the table and drew on the wall what he
labelled "An Ullalume." Another rapidly depicted Parker in the moment of
sketching a young lady; her portrait had got as far as the eyes and nose
when some one protested: "Oh, hello! No personalities."

The draughtsman said, "Well, all right!" and sat down again.

"Hall talked with her the most. What did she say, Hall?"

"Hall can't remember words in three syllables, but he says it was mighty
brilliant and mighty deep."

"They say she's a niece of Mrs. Bowen's. She's staying with Mrs. Bowen."

Then it was the wisdom and brilliancy and severity of Imogene Graham
that these young men stood in awe of! Colville remembered how the minds
of girls of twenty had once dazzled him. "And yes," he mused, "she must
have believed that we were talking literature in the Cascine. Certainly
I should have thought it an intellectual time when I was at that age,"
he owned to himself with forlorn irony.

The young fellows went on to speak of Mrs. Bowen, whom it seemed they
had known the winter before. She had been very polite to them; they
praised her as if she were quite an old woman.

"But she must have been a very pretty girl," one of them put in.

"Well, she has a good deal of style yet."

"Oh yes, but she never could have been a beauty like the other one."

On her part, Imogene was very sober when she met Mrs. Bowen, though she
had come in flushed and excited from the air and the morning's
adventure. Mrs. Bowen was sitting by the fire, placidly reading; a vase
of roses on the little table near her diffused the delicate odour of
winter roses through the room; all seemed very still and dim, and of
another time, somehow.

Imogene kept away from the fire, sitting down, in the provisional
fashion of women, with her things on; but she unbuttoned her pelisse and
flung it open. Effie had gone to her room.

"Did you have a pleasant drive?" asked Mrs. Bowen.

"Very," said the girl.

"Mr. Morton brought you these roses," continued Mrs. Bowen.

"Oh," said Imogene, with a cold glance at them.

"The Flemmings have asked us to a party Thursday. There is to be
dancing."

"The Flemmings?"

"Yes." As if she now saw reason to do so, Mrs. Bowen laid the book face
downward in her lap. She yawned a little, with her hand on her mouth.
"Did you meet any one you knew?"

"Yes; Mr. Colville." Mrs. Bowen cut her yawn in half. "We got out to
walk in the Cascine, and we saw him coming in at the gate. He came up
and asked if he might walk with us."

"Did you have a pleasant walk?" asked Mrs. Bowen, a breath more chillily
than she had asked if they had a pleasant drive.

"Yes, pleasant enough. And then we came back and went down the river
bank, and he skipped stones, and we took him to his hotel."

"Was there anybody you knew in the Cascine?"

"Oh no; the place was a howling wilderness. I never saw it so deserted,"
said the girl impatiently. "It was terribly hot walking. I thought I
should burn up."

Mrs. Bowen did not answer anything; she let the book lie in her lap.

"What an odd person Mr. Colville is!" said Imogene, after a moment.
"Don't you think he's very different from other gentlemen?"

"Why?"

"Oh, he has such a peculiar way of talking."

"What peculiar way?"

"Oh, I don't know. Plenty of the young men I see talk cynically, and I
do sometimes myself--desperately, don't you know. But then I know very
well we don't mean anything by it."

"And do you think Mr. Colville does? Do you think he talks cynically?"

Imogene leaned back in her chair and reflected. "No," she returned
slowly, "I can't say that he does. But he talks lightly, with a kind of
touch and go that makes you feel that he has exhausted all feeling. He
doesn't parade it at all. But you hear between the words, don't you
know, just as you read between the lines in some kinds of poetry. Of
course it's everything in knowing what he's been through. He's perfectly
unaffected; and don't you think he's good?"

"Oh yes," sighed Mrs. Bowen. "In his way."

"But he sees through you. Oh, quite! Nothing escapes him, and pretty
soon he lets out that he has seen through you, and then you feel so
_flat_! Oh, it's perfectly intoxicating to be with him. I would give the
world to talk as he does."

"What was your talk all about?"

"Oh, I don't know. I suppose it would have been called rather
intellectual."

Mrs. Bowen smiled infinitesimally. But after a moment she said gravely,
"Mr. Colville is very much older than you. He's old enough to be your
father."

"Yes, I know that. You feel that he feels old, and it's perfectly
tragical. Sometimes when he turns that slow, dull, melancholy look on
you, he seems a thousand years old."

"I don't mean that he's positively old," said Mrs. Bowen. "He's only old
comparatively."

"Oh yes; I understand that. And I don't mean that he really seems a
thousand years old. What I meant was, he seems a thousand years off, as
if he were still young, and had got left behind somehow. He seems to be
on the other side of some impassable barrier, and you want to get over
there and help him to our side, but you can't do it. I suppose his
talking in that light way is merely a subterfuge to hide his feeling, to
make him forget."

Mrs. Bowen fingered the edges of her book. "You mustn't let your fancy
run away with you, Imogene," she said, with a little painful smile.

"Oh, I _like_ to let it run away with me. And when I get such a subject
as Mr. Colville, there's no stopping. I can't stop, and I don't _wish_
to stop. Shouldn't you have thought that he would have been perfectly
crushed at the exhibition he made of himself in the Lancers last night?
He wasn't the least embarrassed when he met me, and the only allusion he
made to it was to say that he had been up late, and had danced too much.
Wasn't it wonderful he could do it? Oh, if _I_ could do that!"

"I wish he could have avoided the occasion for his bravado," said Mrs.
Bowen.

"I think I was a little to blame, perhaps," said the girl. "I beckoned
him to come and take the vacant place."

"I don't see that that was an excuse," returned Mrs. Bowen primly.

Imogene seemed insensible to the tone, as it concerned herself; it only
apparently reminded her of something. "Guess what Mr. Colville said,
when I had been silly, and then tried to make up for it by being very
dignified all of a sudden?"

"I don't know. How had you been silly?"

The servant brought in some cards. Imogene caught up the pelisse which
she had been gradually shedding as she sat talking to Mrs. Bowen, and
ran out of the room by another door.

They did not recur to the subject. But that night, when Mrs. Bowen went
to say good night to Effie, after the child had gone to bed, she
lingered.

"Effie," she said at last, in a husky whisper, "what did Imogene say to
Mr. Colville to-day that made him laugh?"

"I don't know," said the child. "They kept laughing at so many things."

"Laughing?"

"Yes; he laughed. Do you mean toward the last, when he had been throwing
stones into the river?"

"It must have been then."

The child stretched herself drowsily. "Oh I couldn't understand it all.
She wanted to throw a stone in the river, but he told her she had better
not. But that didn't make _him_ laugh. She was so very stiff just
afterward that he said the weather had changed, and that made _us_
laugh."

"Was that all?"

"We kept laughing ever so long. I never saw any one like Mr. Colville.
How queerly the fire shines on your face! It gives you such a beautiful
complexion."

"Does it?"

"Yes, lovely." The child's mother stooped over and kissed her. "You're
the prettiest mamma in the world," she said, throwing her arms round her
neck. "Sometimes I can't tell whether Imogene is prettier or not, but
to-night I'm certain you are. Do you like to have me think that?"

"Yes--yes. But don't pull me down so; you hurt my neck. Good night."

The child let her go. "I haven't said my prayer yet, mamma. I was
thinking."

"Well, say it now, then," said the mother gently.

When the child had finished she turned upon her cheek. "Good night,
mamma."

Mrs. Bowen went about the room a little while, picking up its pretty
disorder. Then she sat down in a chair by the hearth, where a log was
still burning. The light of the flame flickered upon her face, and threw
upon the ceiling a writhing, fantastic shadow, the odious caricature of
her gentle beauty.






VIII


In that still air of the Florentine winter, time seems to share the
arrest of the natural forces, the repose of the elements. The pale blue
sky is frequently overcast, and it rains two days out of five;
sometimes, under extraordinary provocation from the north a snow-storm
whirls along under the low grey dome, and whitens the brown roofs, where
a growth of spindling weeds and grass clothes the tiles the whole year
round, and shows its delicate green above the gathered flakes. But for
the most part the winds are laid, and the sole change is from quiet sun
to quiet shower. This at least is the impression which remains in the
senses of the sojourning stranger, whose days slip away with so little
difference one from another that they seem really not to have passed,
but, like the grass that keeps the hillsides fresh round Florence all
the winter long, to be waiting some decisive change of season before
they begin.

The first of the Carnival sights that marked the lapse of a month since
his arrival took Colville by surprise. He could not have believed that
it was February yet if it had not been for the straggling maskers in
armour whom he met one day in Via Borgognissanti, with their visors up
for their better convenience in smoking. They were part of the chorus at
one of the theatres, and they were going about to eke out their salaries
with the gifts of people whose windows the festival season privileged
them to play under. The silly spectacle stirred Colville's blood a
little, as any sort of holiday preparation was apt to do. He thought
that it afforded him a fair occasion to call at Palazzo Pinti, where he
had not been so much of late as in the first days of his renewed
acquaintance with Mrs. Bowen. He had at one time had the fancy that Mrs.
Bowen was cool toward him. He might very well have been mistaken in
this; in fact, she had several times addressed him the politest
reproaches for not coming, but he made some evasion, and went only on
the days when she was receiving other people, and when necessarily he
saw very little of the family.

Miss Graham was always very friendly, but always very busy, drawing tea
from the samovar, and looking after others. Effie Bowen dropped her eyes
in re-established strangeness when she brought the basket of cake to
him. There was one moment when he suspected that he had been talked over
in family council, and put under a certain regimen. But he had no proof
of this, and it had really nothing to do with his keeping away, which
was largely accidental. He had taken up, with as much earnestness as he
could reasonably expect of himself, that notion of studying the
architectural expression of Florentine character at the different
periods. He had spent a good deal of money in books, he had revived his
youthful familiarity with the city, and he had made what acquaintance he
could with people interested in such matters. He met some of these in
the limited but very active society in which he mingled daily and
nightly. After the first strangeness to any sort of social life had worn
off, he found himself very fond of the prompt hospitalities which his
introduction at Mrs. Bowen's had opened to him. His host--or more
frequently it was his hostess--had sometimes merely an apartment at a
hotel; perhaps the family was established in one of the furnished
lodgings which stretch the whole length of the Lung' Arno on either
hand, and abound in all the new streets approaching the Cascine, and had
set up the simple and facile housekeeping of the sojourner in Florence
for a few months; others had been living in the villa or the palace they
had taken for years.

The more recent and transitory people expressed something of the
prevailing English and American aestheticism in the decoration of their
apartments, but the greater part accepted the Florentine drawing-room as
their landlord had imagined it for them, with furniture and curtains in
yellow satin, a cheap ingrain carpet thinly covering the stone floor,
and a fire of little logs ineffectually blazing on the hearth, and
flickering on the carved frames of the pictures on the wall and the
nakedness of the frescoed allegories in the ceiling. Whether of longer
or shorter stay, the sojourners were bound together by a common language
and a common social tradition; they all had a Day, and on that day there
was tea and bread and butter for every comer. They had one another to
dine; there were evening parties, with dancing and without dancing.
Colville even went to a fancy ball, where he was kept in countenance by
several other Florentines of the period of Romola. At all these places
he met nearly the same people, whose alien life in the midst of the
native community struck him as one of the phases of modern civilisation
worthy of note, if not particular study; for he fancied it destined to a
wider future throughout Europe, as the conditions in England and America
grow more tiresome and more onerous. They seemed to see very little of
Italian society, and to be shut out from practical knowledge of the
local life by the terms upon which they had themselves insisted. Our
race finds its simplified and cheapened London or New York in all its
Continental resorts now, but nowhere has its taste been so much studied
as in Italy, and especially in Florence. It was not, perhaps, the real
Englishman or American who had been considered, but a _forestière_
conventionalised from the Florentine's observation of many Anglo-Saxons.
But he had been so well conjectured that he was hemmed round with a very
fair illusion of his national circumstances.

It was not that he had his English or American doctor to prescribe for
him when sick, and his English or American apothecary to compound his
potion; it was not that there was an English tailor and an American
dentist, an English bookseller and an English baker, and chapels of
every shade of Protestantism, with Catholic preaching in English every
Sunday. These things were more or less matters of necessity, but
Colville objected that the barbers should offer him an American shampoo;
that the groceries should abound in English biscuit and our own canned
fruit and vegetables, and that the grocers' clerks should be ambitious
to read the labels of the Boston baked beans. He heard--though he did
not prove this by experiment--that the master of a certain trattoria had
studied the doughnut of New England till he had actually surpassed the
original in the qualities that have undermined our digestion as a
people. But above all it interested him to see that intense expression
of American civilisation, the horse-car, triumphing along the
magnificent avenues that mark the line of the old city walls; and he
recognised an instinctive obedience to an abtruse natural law in the
fact that whereas the omnibus, which the Italians have derived from the
English, was not filled beyond its seating capacity, the horse-car was
overcrowded without and within at Florence, just as it is with us who
invented it.

"I wouldn't mind even that," he said one day to the lady who was drawing
him his fifth or sixth cup of tea for that afternoon, and with whom he
was naturally making this absurd condition of things a matter of
personal question; "but you people here pass your days in a round of
unbroken English, except when you talk with your servants. I'm not sure
you don't speak English with the shop people. I can hardly get them to
speak Italian to me."

"Perhaps they think you can speak English better," said the lady.

This went over Florence; in a week it was told to Colville as something
said to some one else. He fearlessly reclaimed it as said to himself,
and this again was told. In the houses where he visited he had the
friendly acceptance of any intelligent and reasonably agreeable person
who comes promptly and willingly when he is asked, and seems always to
have enjoyed himself when he goes away. But besides this sort of general
favour, he enjoyed a very pleasing little personal popularity which came
from his interest in other people, from his good-nature, and from his
inertness. He slighted no acquaintance, and talked to every one with the
same apparent wish to be entertaining. This was because he was incapable
of the cruelty of open indifference when his lot was cast with a dull
person, and also because he was mentally too lazy to contrive pretences
for getting away; besides he did not really find anybody altogether a
bore, and he had no wish to shine. He listened without shrinking to
stories that he had heard before, and to things that had already been
said to him; as has been noted, he had himself the habit of repeating
his ideas with the recklessness of maturity, for he had lived long
enough to know that this can be done with almost entire safety.

He haunted the studios a good deal, and through a retrospective affinity
with art, and a human sympathy with the sacrifice which it always
involves, he was on friendly terms with sculptors and painters who were
not in every case so friendly with one another. More than once he saw
the scars of old rivalries, and he might easily have been an adherent of
two or three parties. But he tried to keep the freedom of the different
camps without taking sides; and he felt the pathos of the case when they
all told the same story of the disaster which the taste for bric-à-brac
had wrought to the cause of art; how people who came abroad no longer
gave orders for statues and pictures, but spent their money on curtains
and carpets, old chests and chairs, and pots and pans. There were some
among these artists whom he had known twenty years before in Florence,
ardent and hopeful beginners; and now the backs of their grey or bald
heads, as they talked to him with their faces towards their work, and a
pencil or a pinch of clay held thoughtfully between their fingers,
appealed to him as if he had remained young and prosperous, and they had
gone forward to age and hard work. They were very quaint at times. They
talked the American slang of the war days and of the days before the
war; without a mastery of Italian, they often used the idioms of that
tongue in their English speech. They were dim and vague about the
country, with whose affairs they had kept up through the newspapers.
Here and there one thought he was going home very soon; others had
finally relinquished all thoughts of return. These had, perhaps without
knowing it, lost the desire to come back; they cowered before the
expensiveness of life in America, and doubted of a future with which,
indeed, only the young can hopefully grapple. But in spite of their
accumulated years, and the evil times on which they had fallen, Colville
thought them mostly very happy men, leading simple and innocent lives in
a world of the ideal, and rich in the inexhaustible beauty of the city,
the sky, the air. They all, whether they were ever going back or not,
were fervent Americans, and their ineffaceable nationality marked them,
perhaps, all the more strongly for the patches of something alien that
overlaid it in places. They knew that he was or had been a newspaper
man; but if they secretly cherished the hope that he would bring them to
the _dolce lume_ of print, they never betrayed it; and the authorship of
his letter about the American artists in Florence, which he printed in
the _American Register_ at Paris, was not traced to him for a whole
week.

Colville was a frequent visitor of Mr. Waters, who had a lodging in
Piazza San Marco, of the poverty which can always be decent in Italy. It
was bare, but for the books that furnished it; with a table for his
writing, on a corner of which he breakfasted, a wide sofa with cushions
in coarse white linen that frankly confessed itself a bed by night, and
two chairs of plain Italian walnut; but the windows, which had no sun,
looked out upon the church and the convent sacred to the old Socinian
for the sake of the meek, heroic mystic whom they keep alive in all the
glory of his martyrdom. No two minds could well have been further apart
than the New England minister and the Florentine monk, and no two souls
nearer together, as Colville recognised with a not irreverent smile.

When the old man was not looking up some point of his saint's history in
his books, he was taking with the hopefulness of youth and the patience
of age a lesson in colloquial Italian from his landlady's daughter,
which he pronounced with a scholarly scrupulosity and a sincere atonic
Massachusetts accent. He practised the language wherever he could,
especially at the trattoria where he dined, and where he made occasions
to detain the waiter in conversation. They humoured him, out of their
national good-heartedness and sympathy, and they did what they could to
realise a strange American dish for him on Sundays--a combination of
stockfish and potatoes boiled, and then fried together in small cakes.
They revered him as a foreign gentleman of saintly amiability and
incomprehensible preferences; and he was held in equal regard at the
next green-grocer's where he spent every morning five centessimi for a
bunch of radishes and ten for a little pat of butter to eat with his
bread and coffee; he could not yet accustom himself to mere bread and
coffee for breakfast, though he conformed as completely as he could to
the Italian way of living. He respected the abstemiousness of the race;
he held that it came from a spirituality of nature to which the North
was still strange, with all its conscience and sense of individual
accountability. He contended that he never suffered in his small
dealings with these people from the dishonesty which most of his
countrymen complained of; and he praised their unfailing gentleness of
manner; this could arise only from goodness of heart, which was perhaps
the best kind of goodness after all.

None of these humble acquaintance of his could well have accounted for
the impression they all had that he was some sort of ecclesiastic. They
could never have understood--nor, for that matter, could any one have
understood through European tradition--the sort of sacerdotal office
that Mr. Waters had filled so long in the little deeply book-clubbed New
England village where he had outlived most of his flock, till one day he
rose in the midst of the surviving dyspeptics and consumptives and,
following the example of Mr. Emerson, renounced his calling for ever. By
that time even the pale Unitarianism thinning out into paler doubt was
no longer tenable with him. He confessed that while he felt the Divine
goodness more and more, he believed that it was a mistake to preach any
specific creed or doctrine, and he begged them to release him from their
service. A young man came to fill his place in their pulpit, but he kept
his place in their hearts. They raised a subscription of seventeen
hundred dollars and thirty-five cents; another being submitted to the
new button manufacturer, who had founded his industry in the village, he
promptly rounded it out to three thousand, and Mr. Waters came to
Florence. His people parted with him in terms of regret as delicate as
they were awkward, and their love followed him. He corresponded
regularly with two or three ladies, and his letters were sometimes read
from his pulpit.

Colville took the Piazza San Marco in on his way to Palazzo Pinti on the
morning when he had made up his mind to go there, and he stood at the
window looking out with the old man, when some more maskers passed
through the place--two young fellows in old Florentine dress, with a
third habited as a nun.

"Ah," said the old man gently, "I wish they hadn't introduced the nun!
But I suppose they can't help signalising their escape from the
domination of the Church on all occasions. It's a natural reaction. It
will all come right in time."

"You preach the true American gospel," said Colville.

"Of course; there is no other gospel. That is the gospel."

"Do you suppose that Savonarola would think it had all come out right,"
asked Colville, a little maliciously, "if he could look from the window
with us here and see the wicked old Carnival, that he tried so hard to
kill four hundred years ago, still alive? And kicking?" he added, in
cognisance of the caper of one of the maskers.

"Oh yes; why not? By this time he knows that his puritanism was all a
mistake, unless as a thing for the moment only. I should rather like to
have Savonarola here with us; he would find these costumes familiar;
they are of his time. I shall make a point of seeing all I can of the
Carnival, as part of my study of Savonarola, if nothing else."

"I'm afraid you'll have to give yourself limitations," said Colville, as
one of the maskers threw his arm round the mock-nun's neck. But the old
man did not see this, and Colville did not feel it necessary to explain
himself.

The maskers had passed out of the piazza, now, and "Have you seen our
friends at Palazzo Pinti lately?" said Mr. Waters.

"Not very," said Colville. "I was just on my way there."

"I wish you would make them my compliments. Such a beautiful young
creature."

"Yes," said Colville; "she is certainly a beautiful girl."

"I meant Mrs. Bowen," returned the old man quietly.

"Oh, I thought you meant Miss Graham. Mrs. Bowen is my contemporary, and
so I didn't think of her when you said young. I should have called her
pretty rather than beautiful."

"No; she's beautiful. The young girl is good-looking--I don't deny that;
but she is very crude yet."

Colville laughed. "Crude in looks? I should have said Miss Graham was
rather crude in mind, though I'm not sure I wouldn't have stopped at
saying _young_."

"No," mildly persisted the old man; "she couldn't be crude in mind
without being crude in looks."

"You mean," pursued Colville, smiling, but not wholly satisfied, "that
she hasn't a lovely nature?"

"You never can know what sort of nature a young girl has. Her nature
depends so much upon that of the man whose fate she shares."

"The woman is what the man makes her? That is convenient for the woman,
and relieves her of all responsibility."

"The man is what the woman makes him, too, but not so much so. The man
was cast into a deep sleep, you know----"

"And the woman was what he dreamed her. I wish she were."

"In most cases she is," said Mr. Waters.

They did not pursue the matter. The truth that floated in the old
minister's words pleased Colville by its vagueness, and flattered the
man in him by its implication of the man's superiority. He wanted to say
that if Mrs. Bowen were what the late Mr. Bowen had dreamed her, then
the late Mr. Bowen, when cast into his deep sleep, must have had Lina
Ridgely in his eye. But this seemed to be personalising the fantasy
unwarrantably, and pushing it too far. For like reason he forbore to say
that if Mr. Waters's theory were correct, it would be better to begin
with some one whom nobody else had dreamed before; then you could be
sure at least of not having a wife to somebody else's mind rather than
your own. Once on his way to Palazzo Pinti, he stopped, arrested by a
thought that had not occurred to him before in relation to what Mr.
Waters had been saying, and then pushed on with the sense of security
which is the compensation the possession of the initiative brings to our
sex along with many responsibilities. In the enjoyment of this, no man
stops to consider the other side, which must wait his initiative,
however they mean to meet it.

In the Por San Maria Colville found masks and dominoes filling the shop
windows and dangling from the doors. A devil in red and a clown in white
crossed the way in front of him from an intersecting street; several
children in pretty masquerading dresses flashed in and out among the
crowd. He hurried to the Lung' Arno, and reached the palace where Mrs.
Bowen lived, with these holiday sights fresh in his mind. Imogene turned
to meet him at the door of the apartment, running from the window where
she had left Effie Bowen still gazing.

"We saw you coming," she said gaily, without waiting to exchange formal
greetings. "We didn't know at first but it might be somebody else
disguised as you. We've been watching the maskers go by. Isn't it
exciting?"

"Awfully," said Colville, going to the window with her, and putting his
arm on Effie's shoulder, where she knelt in a chair looking out. "What
have you seen?"

"Oh, only two Spanish students with mandolins," said Imogene; "but you
can see they're _beginning_ to come."

"They'll stop now," murmured Effie, with gentle disappointment; "it's
commencing to rain."

"Oh, too bad!" wailed the young girl. But just then two mediaeval
men-at-arms came in sight, carrying umbrellas. "Isn't that too
delicious? Umbrellas and chain-armour!"

"You can't expect them to let their chain-armour get rusty," said
Colville. "You ought to have been with me--minstrels in scale-armour,
Florentines of Savonarola's times, nuns, clowns, demons, fairies--no end
to them."

"It's very well saying we ought to have been with you; but we can't go
anywhere alone."

"I didn't say alone," said Colville. "Don't you think Mrs. Bowen would
trust you with me to see these Carnival beginnings?" He had not meant at
all to do anything of this kind, but that had not prevented his doing
it.

"How do we know, when she hasn't been asked?" said Imogene, with a touch
of burlesque dolor, such as makes a dignified girl enchanting, when she
permits it to herself. She took Effie's hand in hers, the child having
faced round from the window, and stood smoothing it, with her lovely
head pathetically tilted on one side.

"What haven't I been asked yet?" demanded Mrs. Bowen, coming lightly
toward them from a door at the side of the _salon_. She gave her hand to
Colville with the prettiest grace, and a cordiality that brought a flush
to her cheek. There had really been nothing between them but a little
unreasoned coolness, if it were even so much as that; say rather a
dryness, aggravated by time and absence, and now, as friends do, after a
thing of that kind, they were suddenly glad to be good to each other.

"Why, you haven't been asked how you have been this long time," said
Colville.

"I have been wanting to tell you for a whole week," returned Mrs. Bowen,
seating the rest and taking a chair for herself. "Where have you been?"

"Oh, shut up in my cell at Hotel d'Atene, writing a short history of the
Florentine people for Miss Effie."

"Effie, take Mr. Colville's hat," said her mother. "We're going to make
you stay to lunch," she explained to him.

"Is that so?" he asked, with an effect of polite curiosity.

"Yes." Imogene softly clapped her hands, unseen by Mrs. Bowen, for
Colville's instruction that all was going well. If it delights women to
pet an undangerous friend of our sex, to use him like one of themselves,
there are no words to paint the soft and flattered content with which
his spirit purrs under their caresses. "You must have nearly finished
the history," added Mrs. Bowen.

"Well, I could have finished it," said Colville, "if I had only begun
it. You see, writing a short history of the Florentine people is such
quick work that you have to be careful how you actually put pen to
paper, or you're through with it before you've had any fun out of it."

"I think Effie will like to read that kind of history," said her mother.

The child hung her head, and would not look at Colville; she was still
shy with him; his absence must have seemed longer to a child, of course.

At lunch they talked of the Carnival sights that had begun to appear. He
told of his call upon Mr. Waters, and of the old minister's purpose to
see all he could of the Carnival in order to judge intelligently of
Savonarola's opposition to it.

"Mr. Waters is a very good man," said Mrs. Bowen, with the air of not
meaning to approve him quite, nor yet to let any notion of his be made
fun of in her presence. "But for my part I wish there were not going to
be any Carnival; the city will be in such an uproar for the next two
weeks."

"O Mrs. Bowen!" cried Imogene reproachfully; Effie looked at her mother
in apparent anxiety lest she should be meaning to put forth an
unquestionable power and stop the Carnival.

"The last Carnival, I thought there was never going to be any end to it;
I was so glad when Lent came."

"Glad when _Lent_ came!" breathed Imogene, in astonishment; but she
ventured upon nothing more insubordinate, and Colville admired to see
this spirited girl as subject to Mrs. Bowen as her own child. There is
no reason why one woman should establish another woman over her, but
nearly all women do it in one sort or another, from love of a voluntary
submission, or from a fear of their own ignorance, if they are younger
and more inexperienced than their lieges. Neither the one passion nor
the other seems to reduce them to a like passivity as regards their
husbands. They must apparently have a fetish of their own sex. Colville
could see that Imogene obeyed Mrs. Bowen not only as a _protégée_ but as
a devotee.

"Oh, I suppose _you_ will have to go through it all," said Mrs. Bowen,
in reward of the girl's acquiescence.

"You're rather out of the way of it up here," said Colville. "You had
better let me go about with the young ladies--if you can trust them to
the care of an old fellow like me."

"Oh, I don't think you're so very old, at all times," replied Mrs.
Bowen, with a peculiar look, whether indulgent or reproachful he could
not quite make out.

But he replied, boldly, in his turn: "I have certainly my moments of
being young still; I don't deny it. There's always a danger of their
occurrence."

"I was thinking," said Mrs. Bowen, with a graceful effect of not
listening, "that you would let me go too. It would be quite like old
times."

"Only too much honour and pleasure," returned Colville, "if you will
leave out the old times. I'm not particular about having them along."
Mrs. Bowen joined in laughing at the joke, which they had to themselves.
"I was only consulting an explicit abhorrence of yours in not asking you
to go at first," he explained.

"Oh yes; I understand that."

The excellence of the whole arrangement seemed to grow upon Mrs. Bowen.
"Of course," she said, "Imogene ought to see all she can of the
Carnival. She may not have another chance, and perhaps if she had, _he_
wouldn't consent."

"I'll engage to get _his_ consent," said the girl. "What I was afraid of
was that I couldn't get yours, Mrs. Bowen."

"Am I so severe as that?" asked Mrs. Bowen softly.

"Quite," replied Imogene.

"Perhaps," thought Colville, "it isn't always silent submission."

For no very good reason that any one could give, the Carnival that year
was not a brilliant one. Colville's party seemed to be always meeting
the same maskers on the street, and the maskers did not greatly increase
in numbers. There were a few more of them after nightfall, but they were
then a little more bacchanal, and he felt it was better that the ladies
had gone home by that time. In the pursuit of the tempered pleasure of
looking up the maskers he was able to make the reflection that their
fantastic and vivid dresses sympathised in a striking way with the
architecture of the city, and gave him an effect of Florence which he
could not otherwise have had. There came by and by a little attempt at a
_corso_ in Via Cerratani and Via Tornabuoni. There were some masks in
carriages, and from one they actually threw plaster _confetti_; half a
dozen bare-legged boys ran before and beat one another with bladders,
Some people, but not many, watched the show from the windows, and the
footways were crowded.

Having proposed that they should see the Carnival together, Colville had
made himself responsible for it to the Bowen household. Imogene said,
"Well is this the famous Carnival of Florence?"

"It certainly doesn't compare with the Carnival last year," said Mrs.
Bowen.

"Your reproach is just, Mrs. Bowen," he acknowledged. "I've managed it
badly. But you know I've been out of practice a great while there in Des
Vaches."

"Oh, poor Mr. Colville!" cried Imogene. "He isn't altogether to blame."

"I don't know," said Mrs. Bowen, humouring the joke in her turn. "It
seems to me that if he had consulted us a little earlier, he might have
done better."

He drove home with the ladies, and Mrs. Bowen made him stay to tea. As
if she felt that he needed to be consoled for the failure of his
Carnival, she was especially indulgent with him. She played to him on
the piano some of the songs that were in fashion when they were in
Florence together before.

Imogene had never heard them; she had heard her mother speak of them.
One or two of them were negro songs, such as very pretty young ladies
used to sing without harm to themselves or offence to others; but
Imogene decided that they were rather rowdy. "Dear me, Mrs. Bowen! Did
_you_ sing such songs? You wouldn't let Effie!"

"No, I wouldn't let Effie. The times are changed. I wouldn't let Effie
go to the theatre alone with a young gentleman."

"The times are changed for the worse," Colville began. "What harm ever
came to a young man from a young lady's going alone to the theatre with
him?"

He stayed till the candles were brought in, and then went away only
because, as he said, they had not asked him to stay to dinner.

He came nearly every day, upon one pretext or another, and he met them
oftener than that at the teas and on the days of other ladies in
Florence; for he was finding the busy idleness of the life very
pleasant, and he went everywhere. He formed the habit of carrying
flowers to the Palazzo Pinti, excusing himself on the ground that they
were so cheap and so abundant as to be impersonal. He brought violets to
Effie and roses to Imogene; to Mrs. Bowen he always brought a bunch of
the huge purple anemones which grow so abundantly all winter long about
Florence. "I wonder why _purple_ anemones?" he asked her one day in
presenting them to her.

"Oh, it is quite time I should be wearing purple," she said gently.

"Ah, Mrs. Bowen!" he reproached her. "Why do I bring purple violets to
Miss Effie?"

"You must ask Effie!" said Mrs. Bowen, with a laugh.

After that he stayed away forty-eight hours, and then appeared with a
bunch of the red anemones, as large as tulips, which light up the meadow
grass when it begins to stir from its torpor in the spring. "They grew
on purpose to set me right with you," he said, "and I saw them when I
was in the country."

It was a little triumph for him, which she celebrated by putting them in
a vase on her table, and telling people who exclaimed over them that
they were some Mr. Colville gathered in the country. He enjoyed his
privileges at her house with the futureless satisfaction of a man. He
liked to go about with the Bowens; he was seen with the ladies driving
and walking, in most of their promenades. He directed their visits to
the churches and the galleries; he was fond of strolling about with
Effie's daintily-gloved little hand in his. He took her to Giocosa's and
treated her to ices; he let her choose from the confectioner's prettiest
caprices in candy; he was allowed to bring the child presents in his
pockets. Perhaps he was not as conscientious as he might have been in
his behaviour with the little girl. He did what he could to spoil her,
or at least to relax the severity of the training she had received; he
liked to see the struggle that went on in the mother's mind against
this, and then the other struggle with which she overcame her opposition
to it. The worst he did was to teach Effie some picturesque Western
phrases, which she used with innocent effectiveness; she committed the
crimes against convention which he taught her with all the conventional
elegance of her training. The most that he ever gained for her were some
concessions in going out in weather that her mother thought unfit, or
sitting up for half-hours after her bed-time. He ordered books for her
from Goodban's, and it was Colville now, and not the Rev. Mr. Morton,
who read poetry aloud to the ladies on afternoons when Mrs. Bowen gave
orders that she and Miss Graham should be denied to all other comers.

It was an intimacy; and society in Florence is not blind, and especially
it is not dumb. The old lady who had celebrated Mrs. Bowen to him the
first night at Palazzo Pinti led a life of active questions as to what
was the supreme attraction to Colville there, and she referred her doubt
to every friend with whom she drank tea. She philosophised the situation
very scientifically, and if not very conclusively, how few are the
absolute conclusions of science upon any point!

"He is a bachelor, and there is a natural affinity between bachelors and
widows--much more than if he were a widower too. If he were a widower I
should say it was undoubtedly mademoiselle. If he were a little _bit_
younger, I should have no doubt it was madame; but men of that age have
such an ambition to marry young girls! I suppose that they think it
proves they are not so very old, after all. And certainly he isn't too
old to marry. If he were wise--which he probably isn't, if he's like
other men in such matters--there wouldn't be any question about Mrs.
Bowen. Pretty creature! And so much sense! Too much for him. Ah, my
dear, how we are wasted upon that sex!"

Mrs. Bowen herself treated the affair with masterly frankness. More than
once in varying phrase, she said: "You are very good to give us so much
of your time, Mr. Colville, and I won't pretend I don't know it. You're
helping me out with a very hazardous experiment. When I undertook to see
Imogene through a winter in Florence, I didn't reflect what a very gay
time girls have at home, in Western towns especially. But I haven't
heard her breathe Buffalo once. And I'm sure it's doing her a great deal
of good here. She's naturally got a very good mind; she's very ambitious
to be cultivated. She's read a good deal, and she's anxious to know
history and art; and your advice and criticism are the greatest possible
advantage to her."

"Thank you," said Colville, with a fine, remote dissatisfaction. "I
supposed I was merely enjoying myself."

He had lately begun to haunt his banker's for information in regard to
the Carnival balls, with the hope that something might be made out of
them.

But either there were to be no great Carnival balls, or it was a mistake
to suppose that his banker ought to know about them. Colville went
experimentally to one of the people's balls at a minor theatre, which he
found advertised on the house walls. At half-past ten the dancing had
not begun, but the masks were arriving; young women in gay silks and
dirty white gloves; men in women's dresses, with enormous hands; girls
as pages; clowns, pantaloons, old women, and the like. They were all
very good-humoured; the men, who far outnumbered the women, danced
contentedly together. Colville liked two cavalry soldiers who waltzed
with each other for an hour, and then went off to a battery on
exhibition in the pit, and had as much electricity as they could hold.
He liked also two young citizens who danced together as long as he
stayed, and did not leave off even for electrical refreshment. He came
away at midnight, pushing out of the theatre through a crowd of people
at the door, some of whom were tipsy. This certainly would not have done
for the ladies, though the people were civilly tipsy.






IX


The next morning Paolo, when he brought up Colville's breakfast, brought
the news that there was to be a veglione at the Pergola Theatre. This
news revived Colville's courage. "Paolo," he said, "you ought to open a
banking-house." Paolo was used to being joked by foreigners who could
not speak Italian very well; he smiled as if he understood.

The banker had his astute doubts of Paolo's intelligence; the banker in
Europe doubts all news not originating in his house; but after a day or
two the advertisements in the newspapers carried conviction even to the
banker.

When Colville went to the ladies with news of the veglione, he found
that they had already heard of it. "Should you like to go?" he asked
Mrs. Bowen.

"I don't know. What do you think?" she asked in turn.

"Oh, it's for you to do the thinking. I only know what I want."

Imogene said nothing, while she watched the internal debate as it
expressed itself in Mrs. Bowen's face.

"People go in boxes," she said thoughtfully; "but you would feel that a
box wasn't the same thing exactly?"

"_We_ went on the floor," suggested Colville.

"It was very different then. And, besides, Mrs. Finlay had absolutely
_no_ sense of propriety." When a woman has explicitly condemned a given
action, she apparently gathers courage for its commission under a little
different conditions. "Of course, if we went upon the floor, I shouldn't
wish it to be known at all, though foreigners can do almost anything
they like."

"Really," said Colville, "when it comes to that, I don't see any harm in
it."

"And you say go?"

"I say whatever you say."

Mrs. Bowen looked from him to Imogene. "I don't either," she said
finally, and they understood that she meant the harm which he had not
seen.

"Which of us has been so good as to deserve this?" asked Colville.

"Oh, you have all been good," she said. "We shall go in masks and
dominoes," she continued. "Nothing will happen, and who should know us
if anything did?" They had received tickets to the great Borghese ball,
which is still a fashionable and desired event of the Carnival to
foreigners in Florence; but their preconceptions of the veglione threw
into the shade the entertainment which the gentlemen of Florence offered
to favoured sojourners.

"Come," said Mrs. Bowen, "you must go with us and help us choose our
dominoes."

A prudent woman does not do an imprudent thing by halves. Effie was to
be allowed to go to the veglione too, and she went with them to the shop
where they were to hire their dominoes. It would be so much more fun,
Mrs. Bowen said, to choose the dresses in the shop than to have them
sent home for you to look at. Effie was to be in black; Imogene was to
have a light blue domino, and Mrs. Bowen chose a purple one; even where
their faces were not to be seen they considered their complexions in
choosing the colours. If you happened to find a friend, and wanted to
unmask, you would not want to look horrid. The shop people took the
vividest interest in it all, as if it were a new thing to them, and
these were the first foreigners they had ever served with masks and
dominoes. They made Mrs. Bowen and Imogene go into an inner room and
come out for the mystification of Colville, hulking about in the front
shop with his mask and domino on.

"Which is which?" the ladies both challenged him, in the mask's
conventional falsetto, when they came out.

With a man's severe logic he distinguished them according to their
silks, but there had been time for them to think of changing, and they
took off their masks to laugh in his face.

They fluttered so airily about among the pendent masks and dominoes,
from which they shook a ghostly perfume of old carnivals, that his heart
leaped.

"Ah, you'll never be so fascinating again!" he cried. He wanted to take
them in his arms, they were both so delicious; a man has still only that
primitive way of expressing his supreme satisfaction in women. "Now,
which am I?" he demanded of them, and that made them laugh again. He had
really put his arm about Effie.

"Do you think you will know your papa at the veglione?" asked one of the
shop-women, with a mounting interest in the amiable family party.

They all laughed; the natural mistake seemed particularly droll to
Imogene.

"Come," cried Mrs. Bowen; "it's time we should be going."

That was true; they had passed so long a time in the shop that they did
not feel justified in seriously attempting to beat down the price of
their dresses. They took them at the first price. The woman said with
reason that it was Carnival, and she could get her price for the things.

They went to the veglione at eleven, the ladies calling for Colville, as
before, in Mrs. Bowen's carriage. He felt rather sheepish, coming out of
his room in his mask and domino, but the corridors of the hotel were
empty, and for the most part dark; there was no one up but the porter,
who wished him a pleasant time in as matter-of-fact fashion as if he
were going out to an evening party in his dress coat. His spirits
mounted in the atmosphere of adventure which the ladies diffused about
them in the carriage; Effie Bowen laughed aloud when he entered, in
childish gaiety of heart.

The narrow streets roared with the wheels of cabs and carriages coming
and going; the street before the theatre was so packed that it was some
time before they could reach the door. Masks were passing in and out;
the nervous joy of the ladies expressed itself in a deep-drawn quivering
sigh. Their carriage door was opened by a servant of the theatre, who
wished them a pleasant veglione, and the next moment they were in the
crowded vestibule, where they paused a moment, to let Imogene and Effie
really feel that they were part of a masquerade.

"Now, keep all together," said Mrs. Bowen, as they passed through the
inner door of the vestibule, and the brilliantly lighted theatre flashed
its colours and splendours upon them. The floor of the pit had been
levelled to that of the stage, which, stripped of the scenic apparatus,
opened vaster spaces for the motley crew already eddying over it in the
waltz. The boxes, tier over tier, blazed with the light of candelabra
which added their sparkle to that of the gas jets.

"You and Effie go before," said Mrs. Bowen to Imogene. She made them
take hands like children, and mechanically passed her own hand through
Colville's arm.

A mask in red from head to foot attached himself to the party, and began
to make love to her in excellent pantomime.

Colville was annoyed. He asked her if he should tell the fellow to take
himself off.

"Not on any account!" she answered. "It's perfectly delightful. It
wouldn't be the veglione without it. Did you ever see such good acting?"

"I don't think it's remarkable for anything but its fervour," said
Colville.

"I should like to see you making love to some lady," she rejoined
mischievously.

"I will make love to you, if you like," he said, but he felt in an
instant that his joke was in bad taste.

They went the round of the theatre. "That is Prince Strozzi, Imogene,"
said Mrs. Bowen, leaning forward to whisper to the girl. She pointed out
other people of historic and aristocratic names in the boxes, where
there was a democracy of beauty among the ladies, all painted and
powdered to the same marquise effect.

On the floor were gentlemen in evening dress, without masks, and here
and there ladies waltzing, who had masks but no dominoes. But for the
most part people were in costume; the theatre flushed and flowered in
gay variety of tint that teased the eye with its flow through the dance.

Mrs. Bowen had circumscribed the adventure so as to exclude dancing from
it. Imogene was not to dance. One might go to the veglione and look on
from a box; if one ventured further and went on the floor, decidedly one
was not to dance.

This was thoroughly understood beforehand, and there were to be no
petitions or murmurs at the theatre. They found a quiet corner, and sat
down to look on.

The mask in red followed, and took his place at a little distance,
where, whenever Mrs. Bowen looked that way, he continued to protest his
passion.

"You're sure he doesn't bore you?" suggested Colville.

"No, indeed. He's very amusing."

"Oh, all right!"

The waltz ceased; the whirling and winding confusion broke into an
irregular streaming hither and thither, up and down. They began to pick
out costumes and characters that interested them. Clowns in white, with
big noses, and harlequins in their motley, with flat black masks,
abounded. There were some admirable grasshoppers in green, with long
antennae quivering from their foreheads. Two or three Mephistos reddened
through the crowd. Several knights in armour got about with difficulty,
apparently burdened by their greaves and breastplates.

A group of leaping and dancing masks gathered around a young man in
evening dress, with long hair, who stood leaning against a pillar near
them, and who underwent their mockeries with a smile of patience, half
amused, half tormented.

When they grew tired of baiting him, and were looking about for other
prey, the red mask redoubled his show of devotion to Mrs. Bowen, and the
other masks began to flock round and approve.

"Oh, now," she said, with a little embarrassed laugh, in which there was
no displeasure, "I think you may ask him to go away. But don't be harsh
with him," she added, at a brusque movement which Colville made toward
the mask.

"Oh, why should I be harsh with him? We're not rivals." This was not in
good taste either, Colville felt. "Besides, I'm an Italian too," he
said, to retrieve himself. He made a few paces toward the mask, and said
in a low tone, with gentle sug

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