“Not for me,” answered the lover pensively; “no one could be too thin for me.”
He resumed his cigarette. It was nine and there were seven left. I calculated that they would last him till eleven.
“There was a lady in Rome I once knew,” he began in a tone of reminiscence, “thin like a match and so beautiful,” he extended his hand in the air, the first finger and thumb pressed together as if he might have been holding the match-like lady between them, “a blonde with brown eyes, immense eyes. Oh, Dio mio!” His voice trailed away into silence, swamped by a flood of memory.
“Were you in love with her, too?” I have noticed that the confiding young men expect the sympathetic woman to ask leading questions.
“Yes,” said the count gravely, “four years ago.”
“You must have been very young.”
Such remarks as this are out of character. They take me unawares and come from the American part of me—not the human universal part, but that which is individual and local.
“Oh, no, I was nineteen.” He went back to his memories. “She was all bones, but such beautiful bones. One winter she had a dress made of fur and she looked like an umbrella in it. This way,” he extended his hands and described two straight perpendicular lines in the air, “the same size all the way up. Wonderful!”
“Our young men don’t fall in love so early,” I said.
“They don’t fall in love at all,” replied the count, “neither do the women. They only flirt, all of them, except Miss Harris.”