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 newcomer. 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 someone 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
