The young man grinned cheerfully and replied in meticulous English. “Madmoiselle, I should go to Italy.”
“Bon!” Cynthia was enchanted that his advice should agree with her mental toss of a coin. “And where in Italy, please?”
The young man grinned more widely and shuffled the papers on his counter. Here then was a customer for the tickets he had to sell. “Madmoiselle, I should go to the palio in Siena. It is the month for that. Madmoiselle has heard of the palio? Non? Oh, but then——,” and he proceeded to expound.
Twenty minutes later Cynthia, walking on air, emerged from Cook and Sons. In her purse reposed a ticket for Italy. And the palio in Siena would be one of those things she could talk of, once she got to the age of relating, “When I was in Italy.”
Five days later Cynthia, in Siena, pressed her small tip tilted nose flat against the glass of the dusty window, peering in. She had come again, for the third time today to see the frame. The lovely leather frame was right in the foreground propped against the glass, just as it had been yesterday and probably for weeks and weeks before that. Beside it lay other leather things; cigarette cases, glove boxes and portfolios, all beautiful. But it was the frame that interested Cynthia.
It was the one frame in all Siena, which, after all is a city of leather frames, for the photograph of Chick which she had received in the mail in Marseilles. And nothing short of perfection was worthy of holding that picture. In it the face of Chick squarely fronted the beholder, the hair of Chick was fluffy and rumpled, as it had been when the Academy bunch had given him his nickname, the eyes looked straight and truly into the eyes of Cynthia, and the quirky mouth seemed just about to say: “Hi, Cynthia ... Darling!”
The frame was wine colored, the leather as soft as old satin, and all around its edge was a delicate gold border of conventional ivy leaves, with, next to it, a band of oak leaves and tiny acorns, and inside, next to the glass a tiny frail beading. All very simple but it was the color and the workmanship that held Cynthia’s eye.
She sighed. She knew to a lira just exactly what was in her purse, knew that she mustn’t afford the frame, no matter how low the price might be. Nevertheless she pushed open the paint scarred old door in the stone housefront and entered the little shop.
It was, as she had expected, dim and dusty within. The proprietor, an aged little Italian with the down-drooping nose of one who works in delicate detail, was busy with another customer. She also, was an American, small and dainty, expensively clad, older than she appeared. Cynthia smiled to herself. After two months in Europe she knew the type very well.
“Too much, too much!” she was saying, in Italian over and over again, and gestured prettily with a gloved hand toward a small pile of cigarette cases lying on the counter. Unexpectedly then she turned to Cynthia.