“My opinion on that point, dear Mrs. Hawthorne, would rather depend on what you paid for it.”
“Oh, would it?” She lost impetus, and gave a moment to reflection. “Well, I shall never know, then, for I’m not going to tell you. One’s enough blaming me for extravagance.”
“My dear Mrs. Hawthorne, pray don’t suppose me bold enough to–”
147“Oh, you’re bold enough, my friend. But while I like my friends to speak their minds, I’ve had just enough of it for one day, d’ you see? I’ve had enough, in fact, to make me sort of homesick.”
She looked it, and not as far as could be from tears. The small vexation of his failure to think her treasure worth anything she might have paid for it, the intimation that he might join the camp of the enemy in finding her extravagant, had acted apparently as a last straw.
“Oh, Mrs. Hawthorne, I beg of you not to feel homesick!” he cried, compunctious and really eager. “It’s such a poor compliment to Florence and to us, you know, us Florentines, who owe you so much for bringing among us this winter your splendid laughter and good spirits and the dimples which it does us so much good to see.”
“No,” she said ruefully, “you can’t rub me the right way till I’m contented here as I was yesterday. Florence is all right, and the Florentines are mighty polite; but–” She looked at the fire a moment, while he tried, and failed, to find something effectively soothing to say. “In the State of Massachusetts there’s a sort of spit running into the sea, and on a sand hill of this there’s a little shingled house that never had a drop of paint outside of it nor of plumbing inside; but there’s an old well at the back, deep as they dig them, with, on the hottest day, ice-water at the bottom. The yard is pretty well scratched up by the hens, but there are a few things in it you can’t kill out–some lilacs and some tiger-lilies and a darling, ragged, straggling old strawberry-bush. Outside the fence, hosts of Bouncing Bets–you know what they are, don’t you? The front door has some nice neat blinds, always closed, like those of the best room, except for weddings and funerals; 148but the back door is open, and when you sit on the step you can look off down an old slope of apple-orchard and over across it at the neighbors’ roofs and chimneys. And there, Geraldino, is where Auroretta would like to be.”
He had the impulse to reach out and touch the ends of his fingers to her hand, fondly, as one might do to a child, but he prudently refrained. His eyes, however, dwelled on her with a smile that conveyed sympathy. He said, after her, amusedly:
“Auroretta!”
She brightened.