“No.”
“There wouldn’t be,” he volunteered somewhat inconsequently. After which he went on: “People liked her all the same. There were dozens of them ready to jump into the Canal for her, even then. And I guess some of ’em did. I didn’t, though. I didn’t like her. I liked to hear her sing, but that was all. I had an idea she posed. She struck me as doing the high tragedy act, and I didn’t much care for it. She had funny ways, too. She used to come into my room at all hours of day and night, and I thought she was up to that sham Bohemian game they put on sometimes when they get a chance. Not that I’m so terribly straitlaced myself; but I like people to be what they are, and I didn’t think she was. Oh, I had ideas then!”
He stopped, did Chatty, as we watched the last of the yacht. It faded like a ghost into the purple of the cliffs.
“Yes, she was a funny girl,” he finally said. Then he put his hand into his pocket and drew out the classic pocketbook. From it, however, he took neither the classic photograph nor the classic lock of hair—not even the classic rose. But I will admit that he did produce a desiccated vegetable of some sort. This he held up to himself and to me. “When I went away,” he said, “she came into my room to watch me pack. She had been in the garden, and she had a big branch of lemon verbena. She broke off a sprig every now and then and threw it into the trunk. I found them all over everything, afterwards. ‘When you get to America,’ she said, ‘it will remind you of the girl you didn’t like and who didn’t like you.’”
He stopped and looked down the inlet. Then he looked at his sprig again. I wondered what to say.
“Oh!” I uttered tamely. “So you keep it to remind you of the girl you didn’t like!”
“Yes,” he said—“and who didn’t like me.”
BEHIND THE DOOR
I
We never would have seen the place if the idea had not beguiled us, at Trent, of driving through the Dolomites to Bassano. And I doubt whether we would have been so extravagant about it if we had not just come from Germany. Is any quiver quite like that with which the returning victim of Italy greets his first cypress, his first olive tree, his first campanile? We formed imperishable ties with our irredentista driver, chiefly because he told us that the inhabitants of his dark little mountain city had turned the back of their statue of Dante to the North. Moreover it was May; and I should perhaps confess that we were too recently married to be altogether responsible. So when we discovered the castle that afternoon as we jingled down the widening gorge of the Val Sugana, we agreed that a princess must be shut up in the tower. Whereupon, as if in confirmation of our insight, an invisible dragon suddenly made himself heard behind the walls.