“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 anyone 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
