"My dear child, capital!" cried Arduina in ecstasy. "Yes! yes! we'll go together!"
But Regina made a roguish gesture, moving her hand like a fan with her thumb on the point of her nose; and the other laughed, more than ever sure that her sister-in-law was half imbecile.
Next day they went together to the distinguished uncle, who turned out only a second cousin of Arduina's mother. The authoress had dressed herself up. She wore a black dress much wrinkled on the shoulders, a yellow straw hat trimmed with poppies; a feather boa so thin and worn that people turned their heads to look at it. Regina, also in black, with her inevitable lace scarf, seemed beside her almost a beauty.
The Senator lived in Via Sistina on a fourth floor. That comforted Regina greatly. If a senator could exist on a fourth floor she might get accustomed to a fifth. Still more was she comforted when she saw the Senator's Apartment. It was very dark, and furnished with a meagreness nearer to discomfort than to simplicity. A few aspidistras, whose large leaves glistened feebly in the chiaroscuro, adorned the ante-room and the two dreary reception-rooms through which the ladies were conducted by an elderly chambermaid. There was a portrait in oils of an old man, lean and red, with protruding blue eyes and beautiful white hair (suggestive, however, of a wig), who smiled sarcastically out of his yellow background. The portrait was reflected in a cracked mirror; and the vast, dreary, dark room seemed animated by the two figures—immobile against the yellow background of the picture and the mirror—looking at each other, smiling sarcastically, sharing some half mocking, half melancholy thought.
Regina glanced at herself in the glass, and fancied that the two figures, the one in front and the one behind, had fixed their mocking eyes upon herself; then she turned suddenly, for she saw advancing silently against the yellow background of the room a third figure exactly like the other two. It was the Senator.
"Oh, brava!" he said briskly, turning to Arduina and looking at Regina.
"Let me introduce my sister-in-law," said Arduina; "she has been married one month."
"How stupid she is!" thought Regina, but had herself nothing to say when the old man congratulated her on having been married a month.
"Oh, brava! brava!" he repeated; and Arduina quickly explained the occasion of her visit.
The old Senator again said "Brava! brava!" but Regina understood perfectly that he was out of sympathy with the entire affair.