“He brought you an armful of those very same tulips—my tulips. Do you remember?”
“I remember——” says Mrs. Cloud.
Justin and Laura, of course, were no match for those conspirators, Florence and Mrs. Cloud and Mrs. Cloud’s headaches; though Justin was all anxiety and eau-de-cologne, and Laura was sure she ought to stay at home as nurse. It appeared, however, that what Mrs. Cloud needed was Absolute Quiet—and I am afraid that when the novelty wore off Absolute Quiet was her portion, for Florence more than kept her promises, and, as Justin said, he didn’t want his mother to overtire herself. Of course it was the travelling—because she never used to have these headaches.
Dear Mrs. Cloud! If ever there were a woman without guile——And yet, you know, I cannot quite believe in Mrs. Cloud’s headaches.
But Justin and Laura believed in them implicitly, and brought her back menthol and aspirin from the English chemist’s, and, that she might know what they had been doing, all the fat little catalogues that Justin carried, as it were card-cases, when he paid his calls upon Florence.
For Justin was never happy without a catalogue. It annoyed him sometimes that Laura had such a trick of pronouncing upon pictures without looking at the labels first. She had stood him out once that Sandro’s Simonetta was nevertheless by some one else—who it was she did not care, and she never remembered names. He looked it up and proved her wrong, and then, you know, she turned out to be right after all—one of those unsettling footnotes. “Then why have it labelled ‘Botticelli’?” he demanded, and Laura laughed. What did it matter as long as the picture were there? But it worried Justin. He liked things done decently and in order. Laura’s irreverences upset him. And yet, one morning, when Mrs. Cloud’s headache was more genuine than usual and Laura did stay behind, he found Florence dull, as dull as the world when he had travelled round it. He came home to lunch inclined to think that they might as well be moving on—what about Verona? It took an afternoon’s prowl in back streets, two arguments with Laura, and a sixteenth-century cabinet, an absolute find—dirt cheap—the very thing for his eggs—completely to restore him.
But you can understand, if you are ever to understand Laura at all, how deliriously beneath her sedateness she was enjoying herself: can guess at her dismay when Justin addressed her one morning—
“I say! ’member Oliver?”
“Oliver? Oliver?” She frowned uncertainly. The name was as familiar as the pink clouds of almond blossom in the courtyard below, that reminded her every day of the tree under Justin’s window-seat. You could reach out and pull in a twig to sniff as you read Justin’s books ... the Rackhams—the Arabian Nights. Oh, of course....
“You mean to say you don’t remember Oliver?” Justin was opening his eyes widely at her over the letter he was reading. He always opened his eyes where most people would lift an eyebrow, which gave his simplest question an air of reproachful surprise that put you quite unnecessarily on the defensive. If you didn’t know the answer you felt guilty. But Laura was able to run back across the years to Justin with a laugh.