Queenie was out, and Sylvia was lying down with a headache which was not improved by the procession of these vagrant speculations round and round her brain. She got up presently to look for some aspirin, and, opening the drawer of the table between the two beds, she found a bundle of pictures—little colored lithographs of old masters. She was turning them over idly when Queenie came back.
"Ach, you was looking at my pictures. They are so nice, yes? See, this is the one I love the best."
It was the "Primavera," and Sylvia was astonished for a moment that Queenie's childlike and undeveloped taste should care for something so remote from the crudities that usually appealed to such a mind. Then she remembered that Botticelli as a painter must have appealed to contemporaries who by modern standards were equally childlike and undeveloped; and also that Queenie, whose nationality by the standards of civilization did not exist, had an Italian father, the inheritor perhaps of Botticelli's blood. Queenie sat on the bed and looked at her pictures with the rapt expression of a child poring over her simple treasures. From time to time she would hold one up for Sylvia's admiration.
"See how sweet," she would say, kissing the grave little Madonna or diminished landscape that was drawing her out of Bucharest into another world.
"I've got a book somewhere about pictures," Sylvia said. "You must read it."
Queenie hid her face in her arms; when she looked up again she was crimson as a carnation.
"I can't read," she whispered.
"I can't read or write," she went on. "Ach! Now you hate me, yes? Because I was being so stupid."
"But when you went to the school in Dantzig, didn't they teach you anything?"