Mrs. Bowen herself treated the affair with masterly frankness. More than once in varying phrase, she said: “You are very good to give us so much of your time, Mr. Colville, and I won’t pretend I don’t know it. You’re helping me out with a very hazardous experiment. When I undertook to see Imogene through a winter in Florence, I didn’t reflect what a very gay time girls have at home, in Western towns especially. But I haven’t heard her breathe Buffalo once. And I’m sure it’s doing her a great deal of good here. She’s naturally got a very good mind; she’s very ambitious to be cultivated. She’s read a good deal, and she’s anxious to know history and art; and your advice and criticism are the greatest possible advantage to her.”
“Thank you,” said Colville, with a fine, remote dissatisfaction. “I supposed I was merely enjoying myself.”
He had lately begun to haunt his banker’s for information in regard to the Carnival balls, with the hope that something might be made out of them. But either there were to be no great Carnival balls, or it was a mistake to suppose that his banker ought to know about them. Colville went experimentally to one of the people’s balls at a minor theatre, which he found advertised on the house walls. At half-past ten the dancing had not begun, but the masks were arriving; young women in gay silks and dirty white gloves; men in women’s dresses, with enormous hands; girls as pages; clowns, pantaloons, old women, and the like. They were all very good-humoured; the men, who far outnumbered the women, danced contentedly together. Colville liked two cavalry soldiers who waltzed with each other for an hour, and then went off to a battery on exhibition in the pit, and had as much electricity as they could hold. He liked also two young citizens who danced together as long as he stayed, and did not leave off even for electrical refreshment. He came away at midnight, pushing out of the theatre through a crowd of people at the door, some of whom were tipsy. This certainly would not have done for the ladies, though the people were civilly tipsy.
IX
The next morning Paolo, when he brought up Colville’s breakfast, brought the news that there was to be a veglione at the Pergola Theatre. This news revived Colville’s courage. “Paolo,” he said, “you ought to open a banking-house.” Paolo was used to being joked by foreigners who could not speak Italian very well; he smiled as if he understood.
The banker had his astute doubts of Paolo’s intelligence; the banker in Europe doubts all news not originating in his house; but after a day or two the advertisements in the newspapers carried conviction even to the banker.
When Colville went to the ladies with news of the veglione, he found that they had already heard of it. “Should you like to go?” he asked Mrs. Bowen.
“I don’t know. What do you think?” she asked in turn.
“Oh, it’s for you to do the thinking. I only know what I want.”
Imogene said nothing, while she watched the internal debate as it expressed itself in Mrs. Bowen’s face.
“People go in boxes,” she said thoughtfully; “but you would feel that a box wasn’t the same thing exactly?”
“We went on the floor,” suggested Colville.
“It was very different then. And, besides, Mrs. Finlay had absolutely no sense of propriety.” When a woman has explicitly condemned a given action, she apparently gathers courage for its commission under a little different conditions. “Of course, if we went upon the floor, I shouldn’t wish it to be known at all, though foreigners can do almost anything they like.”
“Really,” said Colville, “when it comes to that, I don’t see any harm in it.”
“And you say go?”
“I say whatever you say.”
Mrs. Bowen looked from him to Imogene. “I don’t either,” she said finally, and they understood that she meant the harm which he had not seen.
“Which of us has been so good as to deserve this?” asked Colville.
“Oh, you have all been good,” she said. “We shall go in masks and dominoes,” she continued. “Nothing will happen, and who should know us if anything did?” They had received tickets to the great Borghese ball, which is still a fashionable and desired event of the Carnival to foreigners in Florence; but their preconceptions of the veglione threw into the shade the entertainment which the gentlemen of Florence offered to favoured sojourners.
“Come,” said Mrs. Bowen, “you must go with us and help us choose our dominoes.”
A prudent woman does not do an imprudent thing by halves. Effie was to be allowed to go to the veglione too, and she went with them to the shop where they were to hire their dominoes. It would be so much more fun, Mrs. Bowen said, to choose the dresses in the shop than to have them sent home for you to look at. Effie was to be in black; Imogene was to have a light blue domino, and Mrs. Bowen chose a purple one; even where their faces were not to be seen they considered their complexions in choosing the colours. If you happened to find a friend, and wanted to unmask, you would not want to look horrid. The shop people took the vividest interest in it all, as if it were a new thing to them, and
