He and she sit over the fire she has built, and she listens with breathless interest to his schemes for the betterment of the world, while the rest of its inhabitants drift in and out of her indifferent ken like the snow-flakes’ indistinguishable millions drifting past her window-panes. Yet this indifference is less selfishness than an armour assumed. Like any hermit crab she must borrow a shell for her excursions because she knows herself a soft-bodied creature, impressed so easily by all the other people of the world who, she asserts passionately, never can or shall impress her. She is, nevertheless, vaguely enlightened when she returns, changed a little in spite of herself, her armour dinted, taught at least where it was weakest, if her fellow-man acclaim the improvement. Then there was, after all, she supposes, if she be eighteen and Laura, some use in all those other people who did not interest her ... educational.... That, looking back might have been the use and excuse for Oliver Seton. He had certainly taught her a lesson or two for which she had been anything but grateful at the time. A stupid man.... She could still go pink, years later, when she thought, as she seldom did, of him and his stupidity. Poor Oliver!
From the first she was prejudiced against him. The travelling companions had been in Florence ten soft blue days, and Florence, with her palaces and wistaria and agate-coloured river, welcomed them, was kind, almost as kind as Mrs. Cloud, whose thrice-blessed headaches came on regularly every other day or so at nine in the morning, and were always over by tea-time. You might almost imagine that Florence and Mrs. Cloud, those two beautiful old women, had talked things over.
“Delighted, my dear! Just you leave them to me. You’ll stay at home, of course?”
“I suppose I’d better——”
“Young folk, my dear!”
“Oh, I do so like to hear them talking,” says Mrs. Cloud wistfully.
“So do I—always did. I remember listening, just such a spring as this it was—the almonds blossomed early—and—‘Sandro,’ she says, like a bird—‘Sandro!’ and throws a tulip to him over the garden wall. You know my little wild tulips?”
Mrs. Cloud knows them.
“Dear, dear, how it brings things back! But I shut all my eyes. Two was company even then. Why, you yourself, only yesterday——”
Mrs. Cloud has such a pretty laugh.