The loveliness of Florence at this point of the year, while inspiring poets, made the rest feel helpless before the task of finding words for it. Even Aurora, who could not be called contemplative, or highly susceptible to influences of form and color, was heard to heave an occasional great sigh, so was her heart oppressed, she could not think why, during their drives among the hills around Florence, by the sight of the spring flowers,–tulips, narcissi, fleur-de-lys, imagine it, growing wild, as if gold pieces should lie scattered in the road for passers to pick up!–and by the sight of the warm and tender tones of the sky, and by the silver sparks of windows flashing back the sun where the hazy city houses huddled around the Duomo’s brown head and shoulders, majestically lifted above them.
It was something in the air, Aurora thought, which forced her to sigh with that half-sweet oppression and fatigue: the air was fragrant with a scent which seemed to her upon sniffing it analytically to be the breath of hyacinths; and the air was warm, it “let her down,” she said.
Why, instead of delicious contentment, is a sort of melancholy, of unrest, created in us by the beauty of spring, will somebody tell?
Aurora, when she thought she could do it without attracting the notice of the other two, would slip from their presence sometimes, so as to have a few minutes by herself 334and stop pretending to be so everlastingly light of heart. For nothing in the world would she have had Tom know but that his visit made her happy to the point of forgetting every subject of care or annoyance.
Estelle, too, she would have preferred to deceive. She did her best, and for hours at a time appeared serene and merry. During these periods she sometimes did actually lose the sense of anxious suspense; but it kept itself alive as an undercurrent to her laughter.
When she saw how well Tom and Estelle got along together, she became less timid about arranging little absences from them; she even–such a common feminine mind had Aurora–saw in the congeniality which permitted them to remain for half an hour in each other’s company without boredom the foundation of a dream, dim and distant, it is true–the dream of seeing Estelle one day settled in a fine home of her own. She feared, though, there might be bridges to cross before that event. She dreaded the bridges. She wished Tom might be diverted from what she feared was his purpose. How satisfactory, if Estelle might prove the diversion. Estelle would really have suited Tom much better than the person of, she feared, his actual choice.
Of all this she was somewhat disconnectedly thinking when she ran away from them one evening after dinner, leaving him still at the table smoking his cigar, while Estelle hunted up in a guide-book for his benefit some little matter of altitudes. A flash of good sense showed her the previousness of her calculations, and she mentally withdrew her hand from meddling. Fate would take its own way, anyhow.
She had gone upstairs with the excuse of wanting a fan. 335Her fan had easily been found, but instead of returning to her guests, “They won’t miss me if I do stay away for ten minutes,” she said, and walked to the end of the broad hallway, out through the door that stood open on to the portico roof–once glassed over for a party and dedicated to Flirtation.
How long ago that seemed! Here Gerald, a quite new acquaintance, had told her about Manlio and Brenda. Poor young things, so unhappy then, and now exultant. Brenda was just back from America. The wedding was set for the ninth of May. Only eight days more to wait.
As Aurora, leaning over the balustrade and letting her eyes rest on the garden, thought of their assured and perfect happiness, she remembered a gross fly in the ointment. She had been told that Brenda would have to agree to bring up her children in the Catholic church. The thing had seemed to Aurora appalling. Upon her dropping some hint of her sentiment to the caller who had communicated the fact, she had been further told that very likely Brenda too would in time become a Catholic–as if that made it any better. A descendant of the Pilgrim Fathers to become a Roman Catholic! Any one but a heathen to change his religion!...