“But how charming! I have always loved Florence. I spent several summers there when I was a boy. Let me see ... I was there last in 19.... It’s not important. How I loved those doors, though!”
He saw that the young man named Robert Holton was beginning to look bored and Lewis hated above all else to be thought a bore even by a bore.
“And you have been to Florence?”
Holton nodded.
Carla said, “That was where we met the first time. He’s an old friend of our family’s.”
“How droll that must’ve been for you, finding this charming boy here at Helena Stevanson’s who, though I love her dearly, gives the dullest parties in New York.”
“They are dull. I wonder why people come. Why do you come?”
“I’m a creature in constant need of companionship. I go to everything. I must see a lot of people or I become most dreadfully morbid and then I write poems.”
She smiled. “I remember you used to write some good poems.”
He laughed, pleased. “You remember then? That was so long ago. I somehow have gotten all out of the habit.”