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 tonight.”
“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 medieval 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
