"Indeed, it has helped me greatly already. I have been here twice with it. I wrote it out the evening after I saw you. I only wish I had one for each of the galleries! But I feel differently now about asking you to go."
"I told you you would desert me."
"No, it is not that. But Mr. Jackson says you are much taken up with the fashionable society here, and that I must not expect you to give me so much of your time as I had hoped for. He says, too, that your art articles will do me quite as much good as you yourself, and more; because you have a way, he says, like all society men, of talking as if you had no real convictions at all, and that would unsettle me."
"Jackson is an excellent fellow," replied Noel; "I like him extremely. And when would you like to go to the Borghese?"
"Oh, will you take me?" she said, joyfully. "Any time. To-morrow."
"Perhaps Mrs.—your mother, will go, also," he suggested, still unable to recall the name; he could think of nothing but "stirrup," and of course it was not that.
"I don't believe she would care about it," answered the daughter.
"She might. You know we make more of mothers here than we do in America," he ventured to remark.
"That is impossible," said Miss Macks, calmly. Evidently she thought his remark frivolous.
He abandoned the subject, and did not take it up again. It was not his duty to instruct Miss Macks in foreign customs. In addition, she was not only not "in society," but she was an art student, and art students had, or took, privileges of their own in Rome.