But the result was not exactly fortunate for the gaiety of the little party, if Aurora’s laugh had been counted upon to enliven it. Far from shy though she was, she developed a disinclination to-day to speak. She was impressed by the abbé, for whom her conversation did not seem to her good enough.
The young priest, a convert to Catholicism, was Gerald’s age, and had it not been for his collar, the cut of his coat, would have looked like a not at all unusual Englishman with blue eyes, curly black hair, a touch of warm color in his shaven cheeks. Unless you sat across the tea-table from him and now and then, while he quietly and unassumingly talked, met his eyes.
Some persons said that he looked ascetic, some austere, some angelic. Mrs. Foss, not finding the right adjective for his mixture of poise and humanity, was content to call him charming. Gerald, who had known him when they 169were Vin and Raldi to each other and equally far from entering the Church, regarded him as simply the nicest fellow he knew. Aurora had no definition for him, but did not feel disposed to ripple on as usual in his hearing. Yet she would have liked to make friends with him, too. She would have said to him some such thing as, “What are the thoughts you have, which make you so calm, deep inside? But I know. We learned them at our mother’s knee, but in the fury of living, having fun, getting on, we never revisit the chamber where they are kept. You live in it.”
He was talking with Estelle like any other man whose conversation should not contain the faintest element of gallantry, and Estelle was talking to him with an ease that Aurora marveled at. Aurora marveled how Estelle could know, or seem to know, a lot of things which she had never before given sign of caring about. If the two of them were not conversing upon the symbolism of religious art! Having finished his tea, the abbé went to fetch a book from Gerald’s shelves, which he knew as well as his own, and Estelle was shown reproductions of carvings on old cathedrals.
Mrs. Foss, who had been talking of the Carnival now beginning, telling Aurora about corsi and coriandoli of the past as compared with the poor remnants of these customs, and describing the still undiminished glories of a veglione, perceiving finally that the usually merry lady was on her best behavior to the point of almost complete taciturnity, from necessity addressed herself more directly to Miss Seymour, who shared the sofa with her; and from talking of veglioni the two slid into talking of Florentine affairs more personal.
170The task of entertaining Mrs. Hawthorne thus devolving upon Gerald, he took it up in a way that flatteringly presupposed in her an interest in general questions. His manner seemed to her very formal. She forgot that, innocent as their relations were, he yet could not before people speak to her with the lack of ceremony that in private made her feel they were such good friends. But even aside from this cool and correct manner, Gerald seemed to her different to-day–calmer, more serene, less needing sympathy, as if something of his friend the abbé had rubbed off on to him.
As he was going on, in language that reminded her of a book, she interrupted him.
“Don’t you want to show me your house?”
“I was going to suggest it,” he said at once. “There are several things I should like to show you. Will you come?”
She rose to follow, losing some of her constraint.