Favorita was slightly pacified. "Is she at all like me? Paint me her portrait!"
"Her eyes are—m—m—rather nice; her skin—yes, good; her features—imperfect; she holds herself haughtily—chin out, and her back very straight, and"—as a last assurance, he added, "she speaks broken Italian."
La Favorita's coal-black eyes lit with a new light, and her whole body seemed to flutter. Her carmine lips parted as, with an expression of quick joy, she clapped her hands together and exclaimed, "American accent! Per Dio! She has an American accent!"
In her delight she threw her arms about the count's neck and kissed him on the lips. With perfect impartiality she turned to two other men standing near and kissed them also, repeating to herself the while, "An American accent!"
The next arrivals she received as though they were both expected and welcome; greeting them with the unintelligible exclamation, "Imagine speaking the only language in the world worth speaking with an American accent!"
"But why do we not go into the dining-room?" asked her stage manager, a heavy puff of a man. "I have a void within."
"May the void always stay, great beef!" she laughed. Then, with a shrug and a wave of her arms, as though to sweep every one out of the room, she cried petulantly, "Go! and eat, all of you. I am glad, if only you go!"
The company, for the most part, laughed and went into the dining-room, whence the sound of revelry gradually grew louder. The Count Rosso alone remained with the hostess. "Come, Fava, don't be so headstrong—you're spoiling the party."
"Spoiling the party! Do you hear the noise they are making? Is that the way to conduct one's self in a lady's house—I said a lady's house! Why do you look at me like that? Am I not a lady just as much as that daughter of an Indian squaw from over the Atlantic? Those in there"—she pointed with her thumb toward the dining-room—"they would not behave so in the Palazzo Sansevero!" Then, without another word, she followed where she had pointed, so fast that her thin draperies fluttered behind the lithe lines of her figure like butterfly wings. On the threshold of the dining-room she paused, like the bad fairy at the christening.
"Why should you think you can behave in my house as you would not behave in the house of a princess?"