“Strange. It’s not like him to be rude. But, then, he’s not like himself these days. You must excuse him.”
“What’s the matter with him? Isn’t he well?”
“He’s not ill in the usual sense. If he were, we should make him have a doctor and hope to see him cured. It’s worse than an illness. He is blue–chronically blue.”
“Why?”
“Oh, he has reasons. But the same reasons, of course, would not have made a person of a different temperament change as he has changed.”
“I don’t suppose you want to tell us what the reasons are?” Very tentatively this was said.
“Why ... ordinarily one would not feel free to do so, but you are sure to hear about it before you have been here long. In Florence, you know, everybody knows everything about everybody else. Not always the truth, but in any case an interesting version. Oh, it behooves one to be careful in Florence if one doesn’t wish one’s affairs known and talked about. But in the case of Gerald there was nothing secret. Everybody knows him, everybody knew when he was engaged 77to Violet Van Zandt, everybody knows that she married some one else.”
“Oh, the poor boy!”
“It’s very simple, you see, commonplace as possible. But it’s like the old story of the poem: an old story, yet forever new. And the one to whom it happens has his heart broken, one way or the other.”
“And she married some one else?”