"Oh, you woman! Women are curious things."
"Women are romantic things—oh, you man! Why should you understand us Stefanas with your unsentimental soul-of-a-man? What do you know about our dreams?" She had not meant to say quite that. "Stefana's dreams," she corrected herself. "What do you know about them? And still—"
Miss Theodosia looked up from the radiant little face of Stefana with her dream-roses to the man-face beside her own.
"And still—you sent the roses," she said softly.
CHAPTER VI
A letter came to Miss Theodosia one day. Queer how disturbing a letter could be when for so long peace had enveloped her travel-worn spirit, though it might have been because of the peace that she was disturbed. Ordinarily a letter from Cornelia Dunlap was the forerunner of interesting events to break the monotony of life. But life was not monotonous now, and it presented interesting events without the intervention—mentally and unkindly Miss Theodosia termed it interference—of Cornelia Dunlap.
"Why need Cornelia write me now, or if she does write, why can't she talk about mushrooms?" which were Cornelia's most recent palliative to her self-imposed and brief sojourns in her little home town. It had been cats when she and Miss Theodosia returned from Spain, Belgian hares after their long stay in Egypt. Miss Theodosia herself had never tried mushrooms nor Belgian hares. She had borne her short homecomings unpalliated, and had flitted again relievedly. Usually she and Cornelia Dunlap had flitted together. They had formed the flitting habit when family bereavements had left them both lonely women.
"Why must she write about Japan?" sighed Miss Theodosia now, over the disturbing letter. "What do I care about Japan?" Yet she always had cared about Japan. Cornelia Dunlap and she had left that delectable country of cherry blossoms and quaint, kimona-ed women for their old age, they said, to help them bear it. But Cornelia had forgotten that.
"Let's go to Japan," she wrote. "I can pack in twenty-four hours; how long will it take you? We'll stay there till cherry blossom time. Frankly, Theodosia Baxter, I am bored, and you needn't tell me that you aren't—frankly—too. You haven't even mushrooms (they didn't earn their own living, my dear. I don't know what the trouble was). 'My native country, thee,'—I love it. I tell you I do! You know yourself that I never stay overnight in a place without unfurling my country's flag. Remember in sunny Italy?—the little brown bambino that cheered my colors? But I love my country best—in Japan! Come, dear, pack—pack! If I can leave my mushrooms, I guess you can leave your lonesome, big house in Nowhere."
Miss Theodosia dreamed a little over her letter, of the little island of romance and flowers and fans. They did not need to wait; they could go again when they were old.