O Genteel Lady!/Chapter 9

by Esther Louise Forbes

Chapter IX

To Italy

1

She bowed and did not offer her hand. 'Mr. Cuncliffe, I presume.'

'Yes,' said the young man waiting for her in the candlelight of the pension drawing-room. 'I'm driving back to my own little villa to-night, but first I wished to know that you had arrived safely. And Gian here,'—Gian and he spoke in Italian—'you have been a good dog?'

'Oh, Gian has done everything.'

'Then watch the servants with the lady's luggage.'

'Gian's a good man,' he said when he was gone, 'and the most religious I have ever known, but he didn't make you go to church every day, did he?'

'Every day.'

'The rascal! I warned him that you were a heretic and would not wish to go to church. Evidently he tried to save your soul.'

'But I liked going to church—at least over here.'

He surprised her by saying, 'It is one of the pleasures of life.'

He was an ardent-looking young man, and in the candlelight she did not notice that he was very sick. He had a magnetism that drew her. She felt at peace with him and could not understand how, under the circumstances, there was no trace of awkwardness in their meeting. She tried to tell herself that this was the man with whom Mamma had run away, and to harden her heart against him. She looked at him curiously and a little inimicably out of her long, secret eyes. He answered the look gently.

'Don't be angry with me, or her. Do not resent me. I have heard a great deal about you, Lanice, and I hope we may be friends.'

And to her amazement she heard herself answer, 'I hope so, too.'

Their hands met at last.

'You will call me Roger?'

'Yes.'

'Very well, then. Good-night, Lanice.'

'Good-night.'

2

'Fair Florence, beautiful Florence. Oh, Enchanted City of the Soul, teach me your wisdom. Lily of the Arno. Fragrant...' She put down her pencil and considered. Florence was lovely and romantic, but not exactly fragrant. No city could be that allowed such dreadful things to happen. She found she had developed a tendency of late of starting a lovely description with a flourish and not being able to finish it. Her pen had lost its old unfastidious fluency.

She pushed back the lace curtains of the airy pension room and there below the Arno rustled its watery wings and sped forth to the sea. The drivers cracked their whips about their lean horses, and the rattle of carts and hoof and feet and angry Italian voices came up to her, from the pavements of the Lung' Arno. It was Holy Week, and on the next day would be, so Roger Cuncliffe had told her, the great religious procession which she must not miss. 'All winter,' he had said, 'Florentines shiver in their cold stone houses which there is no way of making comfortable, and the icy mountain winds breathe upon them. Then spring comes with a bounce. You are almost mad with the joy of it, if you are a good Florentine. Birds singing, caterpillars crawling, little tendrils upon the vine, soft air and flowers, you smell them in church, in your dreams all through the countryside. That is why the spring religious procession is so terribly intense and beautiful. Girls go mad with religion and throw themselves under the feet of the marching monks. Monks forget their...It is heavenly in Florence in Holy Week. One feels the genuine pagan spirit.'

'But I thought it was a sad religious occasion.'

'Oh, yes, religious, but not exactly sad. They worship the corruption of the body and renewing freshness of life, death and love. If religion cannot explain these two mysteries to us, what good is religion?'

He was the most charming man she had ever met, this young Roger Cuncliffe with his black curls, feverish color, narrow face, and cattish walk. No one had warned her how sick he was. Every day she saw sauntering through the streets listlessly—and her heart bled for them—the young men and women from her country and England sent to Italy to die, There was one in her pension already too sick to move, and the landlady begrudging this poor woman the bed she was dying upon.

Several times Roger had suggested that they drive to the Protestant cemetery outside the wall where Mamma lay, but she felt she could not go with him and had not the courage to go alone. She had now accepted the fact of her mother's death, the realization of it did not have power to hurt her as did the thought of Roger's quickly approaching end.

A barefooted maid dressed in the contadina costume begged to inform the signorina that the sick gentleman had called for her. Every one in the pension was sorry for Lanice, thinking she had come to Florence to be with her lover until his death, which the landlady, from her experience, judged would take place in the fall. No one knew much about this rich young man, Cuncliffe. A year ago he had taken up his residence among them, and a handsome, slightly older woman had come with him, a cousin, so he said. Cuncliffe, even a year ago, had been too sick to excite scandal, and, after all, if he said she was his cousin, why might she not be?

Lanice found this gentle wraith awaiting her in the damp lower hall, where, after his pleasing manner, he chatted with the porter. The boy—for so Lanice had always considered him in spite of the fact that he was older than herself—was engagingly unconscious of class distinctions, and his perfect Italian broke down the barriers of nationality. He had already found out that the man was a wood-cutter from the Mugnone Valley, that a year before his mules had died and he had found work in Florence.

3

He drove a smart little English pony cart, so obviously bought to please Mamma that Lanice could not see it without visualizing her mother sitting upon the seat, smiling and flicking the whip. Now it was Lanice who drove and Roger took a lazy pleasure in her efforts to avoid the swarming beggars and children. She was so like her mother in some ways, yet fundamentally older—born older. She was a fiery thing in her own way, but lacked the careless radiant pagan spirit that had made the college boy turn to Hittie in his desperate need, after he had seen the writing upon the wall. She, disappointed in that Mr. Matthews of New York, and for some reason out of sympathy with this daughter, had been wild to get away from Amherst and that erudite husband of hers. She wanted to go to Italy and live, and he wanted to go there and die. Well, she was in her grave, poor soul, and he, poisoned and listless, tasting with every cough the corruption of his body as though he had rotted at the core. She dead, and he coughing and raising blood every morning. My God, my God! Life hurt with sudden agony as a grass-blade cuts the finger.

'Yes, that's the Badia. We'll go there some day, Lanice. There's little of Arnolfo's thirteenth-century work left, but there's a splendid Filippino Lippi altarpiece and it was here that Boccaccio used to lecture on Dante.

'Yes, your book on Dante would tell you to look this up. We are in the heart of the Dante quarter. I'd love to take you about, on foot some day, when it is a little warmer.'

Hittie had been delicious. She was such an unhurt able creature. This daughter of hers now, she hadn't the hard child's heart, that can see without feeling, and lightly cast off the suffering of another. Hittie had been perfect for a jaunt, which, after all, from the beginning, had been something of a death'shead affair.

They drove up towards the hills and looking back saw the lovely city of Florence swimming in a golden haze.

'I'm going to show you my little Villa Poppea,' he said. 'You won't need to guide Beppo. He has a home-loving spirit.'

Beppo jogged and the cart bounced. Lanice chatted a little and laughed once or twice when Roger politely said something to amuse her. Once he surreptitiously coughed blood. Lanice pretended not to notice.

They drank white wine out of antique Venetian goblets and ate honey cakes. It was a lovely place, small, airy, perfect. Lanice was glad to see that the old woman who with Gian served this young 'milord' loved him. They would do all they could for his comfort. Quite far away now was the magic city of Florence. They looked down at it over the tops of misty silver olives and crude green chestnuts. The city stretched in the sun like a cat.

In the garden was the metallic rustle of water, and against a broken cypress was a lovely, headless nymph fleeing with outstretched arms. Lanice recognized it as the one of which Mamma had sent a picture for the stereoscope.

'Greek, I think,' said Roger; 'late Greek, but once it belonged to some member of the Medici family. They made that inappropriate rococo base for it and the family crest on it.'

'I wish it had a head,' said Lanice. To a young woman trained as she was trained, it was hard to know where to look at a nude statue if the head was gone.

'Do you know, I believe I'm glad it hasn't. It would have been one of those flat, dish faces with lumpy hair. You can see hundreds of them in museums. Often a curator tries to combine headless bodies and bodiless heads, and fathers archæological monsters. Now the head I see for this nymph is wholly individual and utterly lovely. But come, see my other god, and see what has happened to his head.'

A sturdy, red sandstone Pan of doubtful lineage held up towards his mouth his marsyas pipes, but the head, evidently cut from a separate block, rolled on the gravel and leered up with wicked slit eyes.

'This head fell off when I was in America,' he said. 'I haven't put it back because I used to feel rather unhappy at nights thinking how Pan was alone here with my frightened Greek. His leer was so lewd, and she, poor child, without an inch of clothing, not even a face to turn away from his gaze. So when Nature, or Zeus, or the intensity of his passions finally popped his head off and tumbled it at his feet, I left it where it fell. But I suppose the first thing the next owner will do is to put it back on again. He may even be like a countryman of ours who bought a villa at Cartomondo, and had a white iron petticoat made for each of his garden gods.' He poked at the fallen head with a rather tender boot tip as if he had a secret love for the old reprobate.

'I'll show you the library, your mother's room, everything.'

A high, narrow room lined with books and book-scented—this was his library. 'It is the Canti a Ballo that have especially interested me,' he said. 'X have tried to collect Lorenzo de Medici's own compositions in this line. Strange to think how this bank president, corrupt ward boss, and art patron used to garland himself with flowers and march through the streets of his city accompanied with a few light, light ladies and drunken gallants, bellowing these songs. And they are beautiful things, some of them.'

He took up a theorbo from a crimson damask stool and idly began to thrum upon it. Then, pushing back his damp black curls, he sang a part of Lorenzo's 'Bacchus and Ariadne':

'Youths and maids enjoy to-day,
 Naught ye know about to-morrow.
Fair is youth and void of sorrow,
 But it hourly flees away....'

The fierce, high beauty of the music shook Lanice. The theorbo and Roger and the old Magnifico, dead these four hundred years in his musty vault, all spoke to her of Anthony Jones, and rekindled the emotions she had experienced through him. But, strangely enough, the music promised even wilder, more incredible joys, 'Oh, happy, happy love.'

'Roger,' she cried rather piteously, 'is there anything in life that is all the things music talks about?'

'No,' he answered; 'you see, we live on promises. There is a smell in the air a month before spring comes, and it is more delicious, more intoxicating than spring itself. And sunrise always promises us more than the day brings, and youth more than age, and songs more than life. It is this incessant yearning that makes us poor human animals so sad and so happy.'

The theorbo throbbed an incessant tuneless accompaniment. 'Come, Lanice,' he said, throwing down the instrument, 'we will go to your mother's room and then, this afternoon, drive back to Florence by way of the Protestant Cemetery.'

4

At the end of the spring day they came to the high gate of a cemetery lying outside the city walls. The marble hills of Carrara had grown translucent as moonstones, and assumed liquid beauty. Two tired and playless children held out a wreath of laurel and white violets. Roger bought it, and, carrying the wreath and covered with the children's whispered thanks, they passed under the gate and entered the small cemetery. The day grew pink, and in a whisper Roger told Lanice that under these atmospheric conditions the headless Greek in the garden assumed the tints of life.

'Hittie loved the statue,' he continued. 'She wanted to be buried there in the garden and have it set above her.'

'She knew she was going to die?'

'Not at first. You see, the fever went away once. We thought she was well, but it came back suddenly, in a hurry, the way a man who forgets something races back to his house and turns everything upside down, and finding what he wants runs out again, slamming the door.'

'Roger, did she suffer? I didn't want to hear all at first, but now I do. Was she frightened?'

'She was pretty uncomfortable...not especially frightened. Let's sit down under this ilex tree, Lanice. You see that white marble shaft with the urn on top? That's her grave.'

They sat for a moment. Then Lanice, brushing away a tear, took the fragrant wreath, crossed to the low mound and the white urn, knelt and prayed beside it. Her prayers trod on each other's heels, pushing formless, almost wordless to her lips. She prayed for her mother's happiness and humbly gave thanks that she, herself, was alive. Anthony Jones and Lorenzo de Medici, the opalescent sunset, the beautiful city, this poor, dying boy sitting beneath the ilex, the tired children at the gate. She rose from her knees and as an answer to her prayer came a passionate realization that life itself is its own great reward and that life runs out like sand in a glass. She went back to Roger. His small-featured face was gaunt with sickness. The color high up under his bright black eyes looked crudely put on with a brush. She could not control herself, and casting her body down beside him and clasping his thin hands she cried out, 'Roger, are you really sick? I mean, very sick?'

'Yes, Lanice,' he smiled, 'very, very.'

She could not bear the thought, shuddered, and covered her face with her hands. He remarked quite casually: 'It is all right, Lanice, about dying. You think now that it isn't. But it is something quite natural to the human race. All our ancestors have always done it—successfully. It is quite part of living. I don't mind, so you must not.'

There was a velvet babble of bells from a near-by church, and she saw the pigeons fly homeward through the clear, yellowing air.

'How did she happen to get the fever?' 'This last year while I was hunting about for my canti di ballo, Hittie collected old legends. She wrote down but very little, poor soul. Hers was not the mind of a scholar, nor did she remember very accurately, but it was rousing to hear her tell these old romances. Mr. Browning has told me that since her death he has written out in verse three or four of these dramatic tales of hers. He admired her prodigiously. One of his poems is to be about a lady of the Riccardi who had a bust of herself placed in the window where in life she had watched her lover pass. I think Elizabeth Barrett was almost jealous for her "Roberto mio." Well, there is in the Maremma—you know that interminable, desolate marsh which stretches mile on mile to the Roman hills—an old Ghibelline castello with a moat. It stands alone in its marshes, an unhealthy place.' He paused and looked at Lanice speculatively as if he wanted to say that he had advised against the expedition, but that the woman had insisted, and after all she was so much older than he. 'No one has lived there for four hundred years. But it has its ghost...the one thing in the world that Hittie wanted to see, and find out why it, or rather she, walks.'

'So you went to the Maremma?'

'Yes, and spent the night in the castello. We had planned to stay at the inn, and as we knew it would be dirty, we brought our own bedding with us on the coach. But the place was filthy, and Hittie suggested that we sleep in the castello instead. We built a fire in a fireplace that had not been used for centuries, and Gian spread our beds before it. She was very tired and fell asleep instantly. I walked by moonlight through the ruins and listened to the night wind and the dismal croaking of a million frogs. I saw the poisonous miasma steam up from the swamps and finger through the broken windows of the castello, and I feared fever. When I came back to Hittie, a slight change had come over her. I never again saw her quite herself, although it was some days before she came down with her sickness.'

'Why?'

'She had seen the ghost.'

'Oh, but you do not believe that!'

'No, not quite. At least, I think a touch of fever came first, and then the ghost. We huddled up by the fire together, and she told me in whispers how she had dreamed of a delicate, pale lady without hands who came and stood beside her and pleaded for a little heat from the heart. "I've been dead for four hundred years," she said; "I can't make a fire because my hands have been cut off," Hittie was not afraid of this dream. She was glad to build up the fire, but as the poor, transparent lady bent towards her she smelled a fragrance like lilacs.'

'Was it the season for lilacs?'

'Oh, no. Months away. When she woke up she could still smell the lilacs, and this did bother her a little, and next she saw, quite suddenly out of nothing, the handless lady. But even this did not frighten her very much. It was all too distinct and real to be terrifying. The oddest thing about it was the fact that I, too, could smell lilacs. I did, even after her death.'

Lanice saw his delicate nostrils taste the air.

'This ghost of the Maremma has been seen by almost every one who has tried to look it up. We have records of it as far back as the diary of a lieutenant of Napoleon's, but no one before has ever seen her arms. I've traced out the history of this castello and its great family at the Biblioteca Laurenziana. There really was a woman, a Contessa Bianca, whose husband found her with her lover. 'That day they read no more.' He had her nailed to the wall with a stiletto through each palm, and set fire to that wing of the castello. Crazy, I suppose, I do not blame the Contessa for preferring another man. The lover came back to her, but was unable to remove the knives which had been driven in by the blacksmith. He hacked off her hands at the wrist. But she died—shock, I suppose, and smoke and loss of blood.'

'Is it a true story?'

'It is an old one told of many ladies and lovers. But it was necessary to account in some way for the gutted castello and the fair ghost.'

'But if Mamma did not know the story, how did she happen to see the hands?'

'Oh, she had read some similar legend, perhaps about Sordello.'

They went together to the marble slab, and, even as Lanice gazed reverently upon it, she noticed that the age was misstated. If Mamma was indeed as young as that, she would have been but eleven when Lanice was born. She wondered if Roger had ever made any such calculations. He would, she thought, forgive them.

'I think she cared more for you than any one else,' said Roger, and stopped awkwardly, wishing he might presume to ask the girl whether or not she knew of the love Hittie had once lavished upon Mr. Matthews. They paid the ghostly children for tending Beppo before the gate, and got into the cart.

'For me?'

'Yes, of course she didn't care so very much for...'

'For any one?'

'No.'

'It was so strange about the ghost.'

'Yes.'

Again his nostrils sniffed the twilight air.

5

With Roger she saw the great religious procession that comes but once in three years. They sat upon the iron balcony of a prominent English resident, a pious woman but lately turned to 'The Church.' She hoped that through this spectacle faith and hope might be planted in the hard, irreligious heart of the young man. The sun had set, and the city was sunk in night. Christo Morto and Good Friday. Pilate had washed his hands. Peter had denied his Lord. Judas had hanged himself, and Christ not yet risen.

First came ancient Roman horsemen, flashing through the dark, then infantry, a stupendous number of laymen bearing torches, some red and some green, and boys and priests and marshals. There was almost a suggestion of blood lust in the rather ugly insistence upon the symbols of Christ's death, but the words said during the hours upon the cross, printed upon silk banners, were moving in their tragedy. Last was a conclave of priests surrounded by torchbearers in so black a black that only their white faces and bony hands were visible. These preceded and followed the effigy of the dead Christ which was borne under a black canopy and on a black litter as the Brothers of Mercy bear their dead. Then Roger pointed out the weird corpse-flowers carried delicately by devout little boys. They were, said Roger, especially grown for this purpose in cellars; that is why stems and leaves are white as well as the heavy blossoms. They would be laid away in the Holy Sepulchre. Centuries ago, thousands of years ago, other women had grown the same unwholesome flowers to fill the tomb of the dead Adonis. The Madonna, stylish and complacent in spite of the seven swords at her heart, was carried by, winking and glittering in the torchlight. More priests, monks, marshals, and soldiers brought up the rear. The devout silence that greeted all this tragic glory was broken only by the Latin muttering of the churchmen and the measured strain of ecclesiastical instruments. It seemed a solemn and terrifying thing, mysterious and ominous. The New England girl could not understand Roger's evident enjoyment of anything so 'papish' and 'heathenish,' but never in the white First Congregational Church at Amherst had she been so touched with the Godhead of Christ. There he had been a man, an elder brother. Here he was all God, and she watched the passing of his insignia with awe and reverence.

'Shall we go now?' she whispered to Roger.

'No, wait. I want you to meet the Brownings. They have been standing across the street and our holy hostess has just sent her footman over to beg them to join us.'

So Lanice met the Brownings and was able, on this slight acquaintance and on a subsequent supper at Casa Guidi, to write her brief monograph which was in due time published in 'Fox's Journal,' and which was to remain to time the most vivid pen portrait of Robert and Elizabeth Browning in the earlier days of their marriage. It was in this that she called Mrs. Browning 'a soul of fire encased in a shell of pearl.'

6

The next morning her mind still seemed choked with the corpse-flowers, even as she smelled the fresh violets that were being hawked beneath her window on the Lung' Arno. Death—love; love—death. These were the insoluble mysteries of human necessity. Roger laughed at her distaste for the corpse-flowers and promised to drive her far out into the country. They travelled in a big, old-fashioned berlina drawn by three stout Austrian horses hired for the occasion. For miles and miles they followed the rushing, swollen river through hamlets, past castles and villas and vineyards and meadows. For every turn and every village Roger had his story. Yonder by the poplars and the willows Buonconte died of wounds, crying the name of Mary, and in the same battle Dante rode in the light cavalry. 'You know the fifth canto of "Purgatory"?'

'And you have heard of La Verna, "the harsh rock"; it was here on a bright September morning before dawn (see where I point) that Saint Francis met the crucified seraph.

'Popes with their gilded trains; swaggering Condottieri captains with their fine hard men of war, Englishmen among them; the wanton ladies of Boccaccio stepping delicately in fine silks and speaking lasciviously; the Medici with their gripping mouths and lusty ambitions; Savonarola calling upon man, calling upon God, half crazed and half deified—all these passed upon this road, Lanice.'

The day went like a dream. At last when they reached a heavenly spot Lanice suggested they rest upon the grass, and Roger ordered the berlina to stop. While the driver refreshed himself at a near-by inn and the three thick grey horses pulled eagerly at the flourishing grass, the two exiles wandered under cypress and ilex trees towards the banks of the swelling river. It was spring, and the valley of the Arno was carpeted with the sweet lily-of-the-valley. A great multitude of tiny flowers looking up eagerly from the lush grass, the poplars twinkling in the rustle of the wind. Never a sky so blue, nor mountain of so pink a porcelain. The south wind, the persuasion of the flowering earth, the drone of insects, and the jubilant calling of the mating birds worked their charm. The man and girl sat upon the ground, Roger with arms clasped about his knees brooding with comprehending, tragically contented eyes on the life-burgeoned landscape. The girl flung herself backwards upon the turf, clutching in either fist handfuls of the heavily scented white violets. The sun beat upon her. Earth-fragrance rose from the bruised flowers and spring-dampened ground. Drugged, she lay in her belling dress of pale lavender striped in deeper pink like a fallen morning-glory. The satin of her face glowed with hidden ecstasy. For the first time she could look at Roger's emaciated face and damp black curls—know that he must die, and feel no resentment. It is enough, she thought, to come in out of the void to enjoy the sun, the spring, the pleasure of existence and then to pull this bright earth over your head, sleep, and if you must—forget.

'This,' said Roger, indicating the florescent carpet on which they lay, 'is what Fra Angelico—blessed be his name—tried to paint. Did you ever dream of such millions of little flowers all in blossom at once? Could anything be more like the Paradise of the old hymns?'

But there seemed to be nothing more to say. Through the golden silence Lanice felt a miracle working within her like the quickening of a child. It was as if, through suffering and acceptance, Roger had reached a level where neither the vicissitudes of fortune nor the cruelty of man or nature could longer hurt him. If he could have put in words the wisdom he had learned, the young woman heaped beside him like a dropped flower would not have understood, but she could drink from his presence and feed on his inarticulate calm the spirit that Captain Jones had so rudely uprooted. The whole world, as she understood it, had fallen in ruins about her head. Here in this poised and now silent young man was the answer to all the questions she had ever asked of life. They were drawn together in closer bond than Jones's iron arms. The great traveller was after all but an external adventure. He had touched but the surface of her being. Roger enveloped her in a pale gold light. Nothing mattered, neither Hittie's disgrace and tragic death nor her own response to Anthony's passion. They ceased to frighten her—those ghastly white corpse-flowers that girls had grown for thousands of years to put in a dead god's grave.

'Roger.'

'Yes—my dear.'

'Are we immortal—please tell me what you really think?'

He paused, not because he did not know what he thought, but he delicately dreaded taking away a belief when he was powerless to put anything in its place.

'Lots of people wiser than I think we are.'

'But you—what do you think?'

He quoted from the old sundial that stood in the garden back of the Amherst villa, '"Time flies, you say; alas, not so. Time stays; we go."' And as he spoke she saw Mamma flit through the familiar garden, nod, and pass out into utter darkness. 'All that seems important and worthy of immortality goes, I believe, into the grave. But all that is transient, the thoughts and hopes and questions, the delights and pains—these things are immortal. The individual is only a fine instrument adjusted to receive these immortal sensations. Think, Lanice, how many have lain among the spring flowers and wondered about death and immortality, and life and love—just as you do now. Then they have gotten up and gone home and quite forgotten—just as you will. It is like a great wind blowing by,' he said, 'first you feel it blowing upon you—and in a moment it is gone, or rather you are gone. The wind of human experience keeps on blowing. It is Godhood. It gives us in passing something of its own immutability. Love'—he added after a thoughtful pause—'there is nothing like love for making one feel akin to all past lovers and all unborn lovers to come.'

They looked at each other and both smiled. For the first time Lanice realized that he might have been an ardent lover—a year ago. That, curiously, he was made primarily for love. It would come naturally to him and he had only learned to think since it had failed him. He was curious about her and wished she would tell him what burden love had laid upon her.

7

She said good-bye to Roger with one foot poised on the step of the diligence that should take her to Bologna. She had decided, without asking any further instruction from her father, to let Hittie lie here in this brighter, clearer land where all the colors are so distinct, but right and wrong curiously foggy. After all, it did not matter, and she would not long lie alone, for soon Roger would lay his cinder of a body beside his 'cousin.' He would not let Lanice stay in Florence to care for him.

'I do not need any one now, Lanice. I did a year ago and she was wonderful. But that part's over—so run along, my dear—and do enjoy yourself. I shall read your literary articles in "Fox's Journal" with the most breathless interest. Do a good one on Tennyson—I mean, don't keep on calling him "The Bard" the way every one else does, but show him up as a growling old lion who too early got enmeshed in the silken net of "Ladies' Albums."'

'But...' began Lanice. The diligence was impatient to be off. The guard was beseeching her, or perhaps cursing her, in Italian. She sprang in. 'And write over your own name,' shouted Roger, bound to the last to keep the parting unsentimental.

'Oh...I have already sent off my Browning article over the nom de plume of "Tempus Fugit."'

'Rubbish!' called Roger, and the diligence jingled and clattered through the Piazza della Signoria.

Roger looked at his watch, whistled thoughtfully, and went back to his waiting pony cart. He was very fond of this sleek, thin girl who had landed almost unannounced in the middle of his affairs, demanding in one breath the body of her mother and an answer to all the riddles of life. He believed, partly from what she let drop and partly intuitively, that she had recently been through some ordeal. Love, probably. Perhaps this witty Mr. Fox, whom she quoted so assiduously. Perhaps the professor, who he knew had written her several times and would meet her in London. Perhaps Jones—obviously one of those loose young Englishmen that always make a bad name for the white man in hot countries. If he still were in England and were the man whom this girl loved, she would probably seek him out—women have almost a genius for anticlimaxes. She was ambitious, perhaps more so than he realized. Could ambition have so wounded her? 'There's a flash to the girl—a je ne sais quoi, that might, if she schooled herself and was humble before her art, take her to the first rank. But she'd never wait. She'd spend it all in a series of foolish love affairs or in some ridiculous boiled dinner of a marriage.'

He called to the beggars to get out of his way and whistled to the bang-tail pony.