“My word! there’s no fool like an art fool. But you’re too chameleonic to go to Italy, anyway. It has some several hundred sides, and you’ll absorb a bit of every one of them, and come back a mosaic, yourself. I wish you could concentrate, but I suppose you’re too young.”
“I’m not so dreadfully young, and—I am not bred so dull but I can learn.”
“Well, learn right, then. Don’t let them teach you to rave over Botticelli’s ‘Spring,’—go and look at ‘David’ instead.”
“Mightn’t that be merely a difference of individual taste?”
Mr. Homer frowned. “Yes, it might be,” he said; “have you an individual taste?”
About to be offended, Patty thought better of it, and smiled.
“What a dear disposition you have,” said Homer, in a tone full of contrition. “I have a brutal way of speaking, I know, and I am so sorry. But I wish I could show you Italy as you should see it.”
“Everybody seems to want to show me Italy as I should see it,” observed Patty, placidly.
“Yes, and you’ll get a fine jumble of it! Italy is half glory and half glamour, and you’ll be so rolled up in the mists of glamour that you can’t see the glory clearly.”