“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 Turgenevish?” she demanded.
“The quality of the great Russian novelist, Turgenev,” 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 heartbreaks 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 today,” 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 teacup 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 cockcrow! 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 portiere 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
