CHAPTER XXIII. RECOGNITION.
My dear,' said the Colonel, as Gwen and he sat at breakfast together a few mornings later, 'now, what's your programme for to-day? An off day, I hope, for, to tell you the truth, I'm beginning to get rather tired of so much sight-seeing. Yesterday, San Clemente, wasn't it? (that place with the very extraordinary frescoes!) and the Forum, and the temple of Fortuna something-or-other, where an extortionate fellow wanted to charge me a lira for showing us nothing; Wednesday, St. Peter's, which, thank goodness, we did thoroughly' and won't have to go to again in the course of our lifetimes; Tuesday—I'm sure I can't recollect what we did on Tuesday, but I know it was somewhere very tiring. I do hope today's to be an off day, Gwen. Have you made any arrangements?'
'Oh yes, papa. Don't you remember? That delightful Mr. Audouin is coming to take us round to some of the studios.'
The colonel pushed his chair away from the table somewhat testily. 'The Yankee man, you mean, I suppose?' he said, with a considerable trace of acerbity in his manner. 'That fellow who kept talking so much the other day about some German of the name of Heine (I find out from Mrs. Wilmer, by the way, that this man Heine was far from being a respectable person). So you've promised to go mooning about the studios with him, have you?'
'Yes, papa, and he'll be here at ten; so please now go at once and get ready.'
The colonel grumbled a little—it was his double privilege, as a Briton and a military man, to grumble as much as he thought necessary, on all possible occasions; but by the time Audouin arrived, he was quite ready, with his silk hat brushed up to the Bond Street pattern, and his eminently respectable kid gloves shaming Audouin's bare hands with their exquisite newness.
'How kind of you to take us, Mr. Audouin,' Gwen said, with one of her artless smiles: 'I'm really so delighted to get a chance of seeing something of the inner life of artists. And you're going to introduce us to Maragliano, too! What an honour!'
'Oh, quite so,' the colonel assented readily; 'most gratifying, certainly. A very remarkable painter, Signor Maragliano!'
'But most remarkable of all as a sculptor,' Audouin put in quickly, before Gwen had time to correct her father's well-meant blunder. 'A magnificent figure, his Psyche. This way, Miss Russell, down the Corso.'
'Our name is Howard-Russell, Mr. Audouin, if you please—two surnames, with a dash between them,' the colonel interrupted (one can hardly expect the military mind to discriminate accurately between a dash and a hyphen). 'My ancestor, the fourth earl, who was a Howard, you know, married a Lady Mary Russell, daughter of the fifth Marquis of Marsh wood—a great heiress—and took her name. That was how the Russell connection first got into the Howard family.'