“After I’ve been bad,” she said, “I always am blue.”
But within the hour he had come near quarreling with her, he also, and on more than one score.
It began with his making a pleasant remark upon her voice, which seemed to him worth cultivating. She brushed aside the idea of devoting study to the art of singing.
“But,” she said, “Italo has brought me some songs. He plays them over and shows me how to sing them. We have lots of fun.” To give him an example, she broke forth, adapting her peculiarly American pronunciation to Ceccherelli’s peculiarly Italian intonations, “’Non so resistere, sei troppo bella!’”
Gerald winced and darkened.
“Then there’s this one,” she went on, “’Mia piccirella, deh, vieni allo mare!’ Do you want to hear me sing it like Miss Felixson, together with her dog, which always bursts out howling before she’s done? I’ve heard them three times, and can do the couple of them to a T.”
“Please don’t!” he hurriedly requested. “I hope,” he added doubtfully, “that you won’t do it to amuse any of 149your other friends, either.” As she did not quickly assure him that she neither had done, nor ever would dream of doing, such a low thing, he went on, with the liberty of speech that amazingly prevailed between them: “Extraordinary as it seems, you would be perfectly capable of it. And it would be a grave mistake.”
“I’ve done it for Italo when he was playing my accompaniment. For nobody else.”
“Mrs. Hawthorne, if that little man has become your singing-master, will you not intrust me with the honorable charge of likewise teaching you something? No, not painting. I should like to drill you in the pronunciation of that little man’s name. It is Ceccherelli. Cec-che-rel-li. Cec-che-rel-li.”