“Oh, I was longing to ask you!” said Mrs. Bowen frankly. “It is really such a serious matter, especially when the book is for a young person. Unless it’s very dry, it’s so apt to be—objectionable.”
“Yes,” said Colville, with a smile at her perplexity. He moved off down the slope of the bridge with her, between the jewellers’ shops, and felt a singular satisfaction in her company. Women of fashion always interested him; he liked them; it diverted him that they should take themselves seriously. Their resolution, their suffering for their ideal, such as it was, their energy in dressing and adorning themselves, the pains they were at to achieve the trivialities they passed their lives in, were perpetually delightful to him. He often found them people of great simplicity, and sometimes of singularly good sense; their frequent vein of piety was delicious.
Ten minutes earlier he would have said that nothing could have been less welcome to him than this encounter, but now he felt unwilling to leave Mrs. Bowen.
“Go before, Effie,” she said; and she added, to Colville, “How very Florentine all this is! If you dropped from the clouds on this spot without previous warning, you would know that you were on the Ponte Vecchio, and nowhere else.”
“Yes, it’s very Florentine,” Colville assented. “The bridge is very well as a bridge, but as a street I prefer the Main Street Bridge at Des Vaches. I was looking at the jewellery before you came up, and I don’t think it’s pretty, even the old pieces of peasant jewellery. Why do people come here to look at it? If you were going to buy something for a friend, would you dream of coming here for it?”
“Oh no!” replied Mrs. Bowen, with the deepest feeling.
They quitted the bridge, and turning to the left, moved down the street which with difficulty finds space between the parapet of the river and the shops of the mosaicists and dealers in statuary cramping it on the other hand.
“Here’s something distinctively Florentine too,” said Colville. “These tabletops, and paperweights, and caskets, and photograph frames, and lockets, and breastpins; and here, this ghostly glare of undersized Psyches and Hebes and Graces in alabaster.”
“Oh, you mustn’t think of any of them!” Mrs. Bowen broke in with horror. “If your friend wishes you to get her something characteristically Florentine, and at the same time very tasteful, you must go—”
Colville gave a melancholy laugh. “My friend is an abstraction, Mrs. Bowen, without sex or any sort of entity.”
“Oh!” said Mrs. Bowen. Some fine drops had begun to sprinkle the pavement. “What a ridiculous blunder! It’s raining! Effie, I’m afraid we must give up your book for today. We’re not dressed for damp weather, and we’d better hurry home as soon as possible.” She got promptly into the shelter of a doorway, and gathered her daughter to her, while she flung her sacque over her shoulder and caught her draperies from the ground for the next movement. “Mr. Colville, will you please stop the first closed carriage that comes in sight?”
A figure of primo tenore had witnessed the manoeuvre from the box of his cab; he held up his whip, and at a nod from Colville he drove abreast of the doorway, his broken-kneed, tremulous little horse gay in brass-mounted harness, and with a stiff turkey feather stuck upright at one ear in his headstall.
Mrs. Bowen had no more scruple than another woman in stopping travel and traffic in a public street for her convenience. She now entered into a brisk parting conversation with Colville, such as ladies love, blocking the narrow sidewalk with herself, her daughter, and her open carriage door, and making people walk round her cab, in the road, which they did meekly enough, with the Florentine submissiveness to the pretensions of any sort of vehicle. She said a dozen important things that seemed to have just come into her head, and, “Why, how stupid I am!” she called out, making Colville check the driver in his first start, after she had got into the cab. “We are to have a few people tonight. If you have no engagement, I should be so glad to have you come. Can’t you?”
“Yes, I can,” said Colville, admiring the whole transaction and the parties to it with a passive smile.
After finding her pocket, she found that her card-case was not in it, but in the purse she had given Effie to carry; but she got her address at last, and gave it to Colville, though he said he should remember it without. “Any time between nine and eleven,” she said. “It’s so nice of you to promise!”
She questioned him from under her half-lifted eyelids, and he added, with a laugh, “I’ll come!” and was rewarded with two pretty smiles, just alike, from mother and daughter, as they drove away.
III
Twenty years earlier, when Mrs. Bowen was Miss Lina Ridgely, she used to be the friend and confidante of the girl who jilted Colville. They were then both so young that they could scarcely have been a year out of school before they left home for the year they were spending in Europe; but to the young man’s inexperience they seemed the wisest and maturest of society women. His heart quaked in his breast when he saw them talking and laughing together, for fear they should be talking and laughing about him; he was even a little more afraid of Miss Ridgely than of her friend, who was dashing and effective, where Miss Ridgely was serene and elegant, according to his feeling at that time; but he never saw her after his rejection, and it was not till he read of her marriage with the Hon. Mr. Bowen that certain vague impressions began to define themselves. He then remembered that Lina Ridgely in many fine little ways had shown a kindness, almost
