She shook her head.
“No use. I’ve got accustomed to the other now.”
He felt a spark dropped among the recesses where his inflammable temper was kept.
“Before you know it the fellow will be calling you Aurora!” he said, repressing the outburst of his wrath at this possibility.
“He does, my friend,” she answered him quietly. “He can’t say Hawthorne. Do you hear him saying Hawthorne? He calls me Signora Aurora.”
“Then why not call him Signor Italo?”
“At this time of day? It would be too formal. He would wonder what he’d done to offend me.”
Gerald was reminded that since Christmas Ceccherelli had been wearing, instead of his silver turnip, a fine gold watch, her overt gift and his frank boast, which he conspicuously extracted from its chamois-skin case every time he needed to know the hour.
150“Mrs. Hawthorne,” said Gerald, “you have repeatedly said that you have what you call lots of fun with Ceccherelli. Would you mind giving me an idea of what the fun consists in? I wish to have light–that I may do the man justice. Left to myself, I should judge him to be the dullest, commonest, cheapest of inexpressibly vulgar, insignificant, pretentious, ugly, and probably dishonest, little men.” The adjectives came rolling out irrepressibly.
“Perhaps he is,” Aurora said serenely; “but haven’t you noticed, Stickly-prickly, that about some things you and I don’t feel alike? Italo plays the piano in a way that perfectly delights me, he’s good-hearted, and he makes me laugh. Isn’t that enough?”