"You would if you could hear us; you would have if you could have heard us this morning. And it was only a little one. You see, two people aren't best friends for nothing. It gives you a sort of freedom; you aren't a bit afraid. And when you know it's only the other's good you have at heart, it makes you awfully firm and fast-set in your point of view. I don't mind telling you that I'm always the one in the wrong."

"Are you?"

"Of course I am. But I like to have my way, even if it's wrong. Hear me talk! How that does sound! And I was brought up so strict! But it's so.

I want to do as I please. I want to have fun. It began this morning with Hat saying I spent too much money."

"Did she say that? How unreasonable, how far-fetched!"

"'What's the good of having it,' I said, 'if I can't spend it?'

"'You'd buy anything,' she said, 'that anybody wanted you to buy, if it was a mangy stuffed monkey. It isn't generosity,' she said; 'it's just weakness.'

"'Oh, suck an orange!' I said, 'Chew gum! It's anything you choose to call it. But when a thing takes my fancy, I'm going right on to buy it.

And if it enables a greasy little Italian to buy himself and his children more garlic,' I said, 'that's not going to stop me,' I said. I don't mind showing you"--she dropped her selections from the morning's dialogue--"the thing I bought which started our little discussion. The artist who made it brought it himself to show me."

She went to take the object referred to from her desk, and held it before him, examining it at the same time as he did.

"Do you see what it is? Can you tell at once?"

"H-m, I'm not sure. Is it intended for a portrait of Queen Margherita?"

"Right you are! Of course that's what it is. It's a picture of the queen, done by hand with pen and ink; but that's not all. If you should take a magnifying gla.s.s, you would see that every line is a line of writing--fine, fine pen-writing, the very finest possible, and if you begin reading at this pearl of her crown, and just follow through all the quirligiggles and everything to the end, you will have read the whole history of Italy in a condensed form! Isn't it wonderful? Don't you think it extraordinary, a real curiosity? Don't you think I was right to buy it?"

"My opinion on that point, dear Mrs. Hawthorne, would rather depend on what you paid for it."

"Oh, would it?" She lost impetus, and gave a moment to reflection.

"Well, I shall never know, then, for I'm not going to tell you. One's enough blaming me for extravagance."

"My dear Mrs. Hawthorne, pray don't suppose me bold enough to--"

"Oh, you're bold enough, my friend. But while I like my friends to speak their minds, I've had just enough of it for one day, d' you see? I've had enough, in fact, to make me sort of homesick."

She looked it, and not as far as could be from tears. The small vexation of his failure to think her treasure worth anything she might have paid for it, the intimation that he might join the camp of the enemy in finding her extravagant, had acted apparently as a last straw.

"Oh, Mrs. Hawthorne, I beg of you not to feel homesick!" he cried, compunctious and really eager. "It's such a poor compliment to Florence and to us, you know, us Florentines, who owe you so much for bringing among us this winter your splendid laughter and good spirits and the dimples which it does us so much good to see."

"No," she said ruefully, "you can't rub me the right way till I'm contented here as I was yesterday. Florence is all right, and the Florentines are mighty polite; but--" She looked at the fire a moment, while he tried, and failed, to find something effectively soothing to say. "In the State of Ma.s.sachusetts there's a sort of spit running into the sea, and on a sand hill of this there's a little shingled house that never had a drop of paint outside of it nor of plumbing inside; but there's an old well at the back, deep as they dig them, with, on the hottest day, ice-water at the bottom. The yard is pretty well scratched up by the hens, but there are a few things in it you can't kill out--some lilacs and some tiger-lilies and a darling, ragged, straggling old strawberry-bush. Outside the fence, hosts of Bouncing Bets--you know what they are, don't you? The front door has some nice neat blinds, always closed, like those of the best room, except for weddings and funerals; but the back door is open, and when you sit on the step you can look off down an old slope of apple-orchard and over across it at the neighbors' roofs and chimneys. And there, Geraldino, is where Auroretta would like to be."

He had the impulse to reach out and touch the ends of his fingers to her hand, fondly, as one might do to a child, but he prudently refrained.

His eyes, however, dwelled on her with a smile that conveyed sympathy.

He said, after her, amusedly:

"Auroretta!"

She brightened.

"After I've been bad," she said, "I always am blue."

But within the hour he had come near quarreling with her, he also, and on more than one score.

It began with his making a pleasant remark upon her voice, which seemed to him worth cultivating. She brushed aside the idea of devoting study to the art of singing.

"But," she said, "Italo has brought me some songs. He plays them over and shows me how to sing them. We have lots of fun." To give him an example, she broke forth, adapting her peculiarly American p.r.o.nunciation to Ceccherelli's peculiarly Italian intonations, "'_Non so resistere, sei troppo bella!_'"

Gerald winced and darkened.

"Then there's this one," she went on, "'_Mia piccirella, deh, vieni allo mare!_' Do you want to hear me sing it like Miss Felixson, together with her dog, which always bursts out howling before she's done? I've heard them three times, and can do the couple of them to a T."

"Please don't!" he hurriedly requested. "I hope," he added doubtfully, "that you won't do it to amuse any of your other friends, either." As she did not quickly a.s.sure him that she neither had done, nor ever would dream of doing, such a low thing, he went on, with the liberty of speech that amazingly prevailed between them: "Extraordinary as it seems, you would be perfectly capable of it. And it would be a grave mistake."

"I've done it for Italo when he was playing my accompaniment. For n.o.body else."

"Mrs. Hawthorne, if that little man has become your singing-master, will you not intrust me with the honorable charge of likewise teaching you something? No, not painting. I should like to drill you in the p.r.o.nunciation of that little man's name. It is Ceccherelli.

Cec-che-rel-li. _Cec-che-rel-li._"

She shook her head.

"No use. I've got accustomed to the other now."

He felt a spark dropped among the recesses where his inflammable temper was kept.

"Before you know it the fellow will be calling you Aurora!" he said, repressing the outburst of his wrath at this possibility.

"He does, my friend," she answered him quietly. "He can't say Hawthorne.

Do you hear him saying Hawthorne? He calls me Signora Aurora."

"Then why not call him Signor Italo?"

"At this time of day? It would be too formal. He would wonder what he'd done to offend me."

Gerald was reminded that since Christmas Ceccherelli had been wearing, instead of his silver turnip, a fine gold watch, her overt gift and his frank boast, which he conspicuously extracted from its chamois-skin case every time he needed to know the hour.

"Mrs. Hawthorne," said Gerald, "you have repeatedly said that you have what you call lots of fun with Ceccherelli. Would you mind giving me an idea of what the fun consists in? I wish to have light--that I may do the man justice. Left to myself, I should judge him to be the dullest, commonest, cheapest of inexpressibly vulgar, insignificant, pretentious, ugly, and probably dishonest, little men." The adjectives came rolling out irrepressibly.

"Perhaps he is," Aurora said serenely; "but haven't you noticed, Stickly-p.r.i.c.kly, that about some things you and I don't feel alike?

Italo plays the piano in a way that perfectly delights me, he's good-hearted, and he makes me laugh. Isn't that enough?"

"In short, you like him. You like so many people, Mrs. Hawthorne, and of such various kinds, that though one is bound to be glad to be among your friends, one needn't--need one?--feel exactly flattered."

She seemed to consider this, but instead of taking it up, went on with the subject of Italo.

"He entertains me. He knows all about everybody in Florence and tells me."

"He gossips, you mean."

Again she considered a moment before going on.