“It mayn’t be funny–but it’s fun! Go on and lecture. You haven’t got a bit of fun in you.”
“Yes, I have!” said Gerald, and with a creeping smile–grudging at first, then brighter–looked Mrs. Hawthorne in the eye, while such fun as lived in him traveled over the bridge of their glances, and she was permitted to get a glimpse of his underlying relish.
“All I ask of you, Mrs. Hawthorne,” he said, finally, “is that you will not let your innocence on these subjects appear when you are with others. I don’t say pretend. Just keep still, be silent! It does not matter when you are with me. When you are with me I beg of you to be yourself. But with others.... You would become the talk of the town, and–” he shuddered, “I should most horribly hate it!”
“Mrs. Hawthorne,” he said, with a quiver of annoyance in his voice a few days later, “did I not implore you not to let it be known in Florence how you are affected by the proudest treasures of her world-famous collections?”
“Yes, you told me. But I didn’t promise.”
“And now I am asked–with laughter and mockery–whether I have seen Mrs. Hawthorne giving an imitation of a Madonna by Simma Bewey, and heard Mrs. Hawthorne on the subject of G. Ottow and Others.”
“Didn’t you say–with laughter? Well, then, it’s all right. Don’t you care. I just got to training and did it 105to make them a little sport. Didn’t they tell you about my Native of Italy eating Macaroni?”
“Mrs. Hawthorne, you are just a bad big school-girl–a bad big school-girl–”
“‘Hark, from the tomb!’” said Mrs. Hawthorne, in lieu of anything more scintillating.