Gerald looked as if the question had not been quite clear, 83and he waited for some amplification of it before he could answer.
“Have you got anything very important to do? Aren’t you lonesome? Don’t you want to jump in and come home with us? Wish you would.”
Gerald smiled again in his remote way, and looked as if he knew, as any one would know, that this was not meant to be taken seriously.
“I have just seen a beautiful spectacle,” he said, after a vague head-shake that thanked her shadowily for an unreal invitation. “A game of pallone, which is the nearest to your football that boys have over here. Beautiful bronzed athletes at exercise, a delightful sight, statues in motion. I go to see them whenever I can.–The days are becoming very short, are they not?”
“Yes. Jump in and come home with us. Tell you what we’ll do. I’ll go down into the kitchen and make some soda biscuits that we’ll have hot for supper–with maple syrup. We’ve had a big box of sugar come.”
Gerald again smiled his civil, but joyless, smile, and after another vague head-shake that thanked, but eluded the question, he said: “They are very indigestible; hot bread is not good for the health. At least, that is what they tell us over here. We keep our bread two days before eating it, or longer. But I am afraid I am detaining you.”
The horses were jingling their bits, frisking their docked tails. The driver, checking their restless attempts to start, was giving them smothered thunder in Italian. Gerald withdrew by a step from the danger to his shins.
“Oh, jump in!” said Mrs. Hawthorne for the third time. And because his choice lay between saying curtly, “Impossible!” and letting the impatient horses proceed, or else obeying, Gerald, who hated being rude to women, found himself irresolutely climbing in, just long enough, as he intended, to explain that he could not and must not go home with them to the hot biscuits and syrup.
“I thought,” said Mrs. Hawthorne, “that you were going to come and take us sight-seeing”