"I leave that to your imagination. But talking of game, reminds me of food. Do feed me. I want what at the convent we call 'a high tea.' Cold chicken and bread and butter, and cake and jam—lots of both—and tea with cream in it. While you're pressing morsels between my starving lips, I will in some way or other, by word, or gesture, tell you about—the other part, which is so important to us both."
If his eyes had been on her then, he might have had an electric shock of sudden enlightenment, but he had turned his back, to go and touch the bell.
While the servant—ordered to bring everything good—was engaged in laying a small table, the two talked of Mary, and Jim told Peter what he knew of Vanno Della Robbia and his family. Peter had asked to have her "high tea" in Jim's library, because she knew it was the room he liked best, and was most associated with his daily life at Stellamare; but she pretended that it was because of the "special" view from the windows, over the cypress walk with the old garden statues, and down to what she used to call the "classic temple," in a grove of olives and stone pines close to the sea.
When tea came, she insisted upon giving Schuyler a cup. It would, she said, make him more human and sympathetic. Though she had pronounced herself to be starving, after all she was satisfied with very little. Having finished, she leaned her elbows on the table, and gazed out of the long window close by, at the rain which continued to fall in wicked black streaks against a clearing, sunset sky. "It's like the stripes on a tawny snake," she said, "or on a tiger's back. This isn't a proper Riviera day. And the mountains of Italy have put powder on their foreheads and noses. While it's rained down here, it's been snowing on the heights. As my French maid used to say, 'I think the weather's in train to rearrange itself.'"
"Never mind the weather," said Jim. "Tell me about the 'other part.' You've excited my curiosity."
"I meant to. But talking of the weather draws people together, don't you think? just as the thought of tea does in England and dear old Scotland. Everybody everywhere having tea at the same time, you know, and the same feelings and thoughts. It's different abroad or in America. Tea's more like an accident than an institution."
"Never mind talking of tea, either."
"I'll talk about you, then."
"I want to talk about you—and what's going to become of you to-night."
"Only think, if I'd arrived to-morrow, I should have been too late!"