“Oh, how d’you do,” he observed. “Do you remember having my wife and me to tea last spring—friends of Jack Starling—”
“Oh, but of course! Mr.—?”
“Samuel Dodsworth.”
“You and Mrs. Dodsworth have come back here soon.”
“Oh, she’s, uh, she had to stay in Berlin.”
“Really? You’re here alone? You must come to tea again.”
“Be awfully glad to. You walking this way?” Quite fatuously, rather eagerly.
“Just a bit of shopping. There’s a rabbit-warren of a pastry shop down here—Perhaps you’d like to come along, and come home for a cup of tea this afternoon, if you haven’t friends waiting for you.”
“I don’t know a soul in town.”
“In that case, you must come, surely.”
He rolled beside her, bumbling, “Must be an awful lot of people you know at the Lido now, with the season on.”
“Yes. Unfortunately!”
“Don’t you like the rotogravure set?”
“Oh, that is a nice thing to call them!” she said. “I’ve been looking for a phrase. Some of them are extremely agreeable, of course; nice simple people who really like to dance and swim, and don’t go to the Lido just to be seen and photographed. But there’s an international, Anglo-American-French set—smart women, just a little ambiguous, and men with titles and tailors and nothing much else, and sharp couples that play bridge too well, and three-necked millionaires that—well, they seem to me like a menagerie. There’s a dreadful woman named Renée de Pénable—”
“Oh, you know her?”
“How can anyone help it! The woman contrives to be simultaneously in Paris, the Lido, Deauville, Cannes, New York, and on all known trains and steamers! You know her? Do you like her?”
“Hate her,” remarked Sam. “Oh, I don’t know’s I ought to say that. She’s always been awfully decent to us. But I feel she’s a grafter.”
“No, she’s subtler than that. She is quite generous to ninety-nine out of a hundred of her group—tramps in gold foil!—so that she can get the dazzled hundredth to set her up in a gown shop or a charity society or something else that mysteriously collapses in two months. She’s—oh, she’s very amusing, of course.”
“Neither do I!” roared Sam.
They smiled at each other, to the approval of seven youthful Venetians engaged in doing nothing and choosing the dimmest and smelliest Sottoportico to do it in.
Sam rejoiced that Edith Cortright might prove to be human, patient with large lost men. He was surer of it as he heard her bartering with the owner of the minute pastry shop for a dozen cakes. The proprietor demanded five lire, Mrs. Cortright offered two, and they compromised on three, which were their probable value.
Often enough Sam had seen Fran chaffering, but she was likely to lose her temper, more likely to make the shopkeeper lose his. With Mrs. Cortright, the baker shook his fingers, agonized over the insult to his masterpieces, asserted that his nine children and grandmother would starve, but she only laughed, and all the while he laughed back. He took the three lire with the greatest cheerfulness, and cried after them, “Addio!” as though it were a blessing.
“The good soul!” said Mrs. Cortright as they returned to the Piazza. “We do that every week. That’s really the reason why I go to him myself, instead of sending a maid, who gets them for twenty centesimi less than I do, probably, and pockets ten. But this pâtissier is an artist, and like all artists, a conservative. He tries to keep up the good old days when buying and selling in Italy really was an adventure, because everybody made a game of bargaining—the days that Baedeker wrote of when he tells you to ‘keep a calm and pleasant demeanor, when haggling.’ But that’s all passing, I’m afraid. Between the regulations of the Fascists, and the efficient business of impressing tourists, the shops are becoming as dependable as Swan and Edgar’s or a Woolworth’s, and about as appealing. I think I’ll go back and end my few declining years on Mulberry Street, in New York. That’s about the only part of Italy, now, that hasn’t been toured and described and painted and guided to death; the only part that hasn’t been made safe for the vicar’s aunt.”
In the presence of Fran and her aggressive smartness, Edith Cortright had been abrupt, hiding her heart behind dutiful courtesy as she hid her taut frailness of body beneath frocks of soft, noncommittal black. But now, as they tramped to the Palazzo Ascagni, avoiding the sun in arcades and under vast walls above tiny streets, as they climbed the sepulchral marble stairs to her flat, and sighingly relaxed in the coolness of the vast rooms behind blinds streaked with poisonous sun, she was easy; in a subdued silvery manner, she was gay. It was as though she found everything in life amusing and liked to think about it aloud. And she seemed younger. He had thought her forty-five; now she seemed forty.
The stone floor of her drawing-room, laid in squares waxed to ivory smoothness, the old walnut of a Sixteenth Century armoire, suggested quietness, a feeling of civilization grown secure and placid through generations. The formal monastic chairs which had dignified the room when Sam had seen it in the spring—as well as the shameless overstuffed Americanized armchairs with which Mrs. Cortright had eased the rigor of Venetian stateliness—had been replaced by wicker with chintz cushions.
Sam’s spirit was refreshed here, his hot body was refreshed, and when Mrs. Cortright showed herself so superior to Expatriate Americanism that she dared to be American and to offer iced tea, he rejoiced in her more than in the mosaics of St. Mark’s, which he had taught himself to admire with a quite surprising amount of sincerity. Mrs. Cortright and the room which illustrated her seemed to him quite as traditional as the faded splendors of the Princess Drachenthal at Potsdam; but he could reach Mrs. Cortright, understand her, not feel with her like an inanely smirking boy invited to tea by
