Indian Summer

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 tomorrow; 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 less,” 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. Someone 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