“I don’t know. If he was he didn’t show it. He just said he was used to waiting for me.”
For a moment Miss Cockerill regarded her friend in silence. Then she remarked some what cryptically:
“Well, if I’d known it was as easy as that gettin’ married, I’d ha’ done it myself!”
SUSANNAH AND THE ELDER
I
There was also a Younger.
He had just come down from Florence, where a white umbrella was no longer proof against the August sun, and where even the secular shades of the Uffizi had grown intolerable. But whether Viareggio were an effective substitute was a debatable question. To have sought refuge from the dim-roomed palaces above the Arno in a pink casino required other justification than that of greater security against the attacks of Phœbus, while the charms of a ragged pine wood and of a dubious monument to Shelley hardly threw the scale against the Piazza della Signoria. But there was their Ligurian Sea, as absurdly overcoloured as a lithograph, which one might splash in all day long, whereas in all Tuscany was there scarcely water enough to wet your finger withal. And, too, there were people.
So the Younger stood in the doorway of the Casino terrace and smiled. For while the Stabilimento, like all respectable Stabilimenti, was rigidly divided into two equal halves, with the dressing-rooms of the sheep on the right hand and those of the goats on the left of the central café, it was noticeable that the spectators tended to scatter themselves in precisely the opposite sense. What chiefly caused the Younger to smile, however, was that at the extreme right-hand corner table he recognised the back of the Elder. This personage, upon whom time had already impressed a seal only too legible, was what it pleased the Younger to call a type; and in types he conceived that he found a peculiar profit. Since the Elder, despite his worldly degree, was known in Florentine circles for his assiduity among the studios—not so much in the quality of patron of the arts as in that of amateur of the society to be found therein—what could be more in character than his present post? And if the Younger happened to be better acquainted with the back which he now beheld than with its patrician obverse, he found in that circumstance nothing to prevent his edging through the crowd to the extreme right-hand corner table.
“Ah, the long American painter!” cried the Elder, greeting him with the effusion whose secret is alone to the Latin race. “You have come to look for models, eh?” He waved his hand toward the more or less exposed forms disporting themselves on the sands below.
The Younger laughed.