“If I am not mistaken, we shall find him in the library.” He offered his arm.
“I may have appeared to be doing something else, Mrs. Hawthorne, but I have really been looking for you the last hour,” said the consul when he had been found. “I wanted to have a little talk. How are you enjoying Florence?”
“Oh, we’re having an elegant time, thanks to that dear wife of yours and that dear girl, Leslie. I don’t know what we should have done without them and you.”
“But the city itself, Florence, doesn’t it enchant you?”
“We–ell, yes. N-n-n-no. Yes and no. That’s it. You want me to tell the truth, don’t you? Some of it does, 62and some of it doesn’t. Some of it, I guess, will take me a long time to get used to. It’s terribly different from what we expected–I, in particular. You see, I came here because an old friend used to talk so much about it. Florence the Fair! The City of Lilies! He said Italy was the most beautiful country in the world, and Florence the most beautiful city in Italy. So my expectations were way up.–Oh, I don’t know; it’s hard to tell. I don’t exactly remember now what I did expect. I guess my picture of it was something like the New Jerusalem on an Easter day. But I shall get used to this, like to the taste of olives. It must be all right, for the friend I was speaking of had the finest mind I’ve ever known. I’m green as turnip-tops, of course, but I shall get educated up to it, I suppose. Give me time.”
“Mrs. Hawthorne, hear me prophesy,” said Mr. Foss. “In six months you will love it all. It’s the fate of us who come here from new countries. It will steal in upon you, grow upon you, beset and besot you, till you like no other place in the world so well.”
“Will it? Well, if you say so. The Judge–the friend I was speaking of,–said so much of the same kind that the minute I thought of coming to Europe, right after I’d said, ‘I’ll go to Paris,’ I said to myself, ‘I’ll go to Florence.’”
“Your friend was a judge of places.”
“It wasn’t he alone influenced me. He was sick a long time, and I used to read aloud to him, and one spell, when his mind for some reason or other was running on Italy, every book he chose had the scene laid here. There were whole pages of description, and anything so lovely, so luscious, as the places and people described I never did dream. I didn’t understand more than a quarter, but I 63swallowed it all and gloated. The woman who wrote those books certainly did have an imagination. O Antonia, let me meet you and have a good look at you so I can tell a–hm, the owner of an imagination when I see one again!”
“Antonia, did you say?” The consul smiled.