Pontycroft, I am sorry to record it, behaved very badly at table. He began by stealing Ruth's bread; then he played balancing tricks—sufficiently ineffectual—with his knife and fork, announcing himself as élève de Cinquevalli; then, changing his title to élève du regretté Sludge, he produced a series of what he called spirit-rappings, though they sounded rather like the rappings of sole-leather against a chair-round; then he insisted on smoking cigarettes between the courses—“after the high Spanish fashion,” he explained; and finally, assuming the wheedling tone of a spoiled child, he pleaded to be allowed to have his fruit before the proper time. “I want my fruit—mayn't I have my fruit? Ah, please let me.”
“Patience, patience,” said Lucilla, in her most soothing voice, with her benignant smile. “Everything comes at last to him who knows how to wait.”
“Everything comes at once to him who will not wait,” Ponty brazenly retorted, and leaning forward, helped himself from the crystal dish, piled high with purple figs and scarlet africani.
They returned to the garden for coffee, and afterwards Ponty engaged his sister in a game of lawn-golf, leaving Ruth and Bertram to look on from the terrace, where Ruth sat among bright-hued cushions in a wicker chair, and Bertram (conscious of a pleasant agitation) leaned on the lichen-stained marble balustrade.
“Poor Lucilla,” she said to him, the laughter in her eyes coming to the surface, “she hates it, you know. But I suppose Harry honestly thinks it amuses her, and she's too good-natured to undeceive him.”
“There are red notes in her very voice,” said Bertram to himself. “Poor lady,” he said aloud. “'Tis her penalty for having an English brother. A game of one sort or another is an Englishman's sole conception of happiness. And that is the real explanation of Anglo-Saxon superiority. Englishmen take the most serious businesses of life as games—war, politics, commerce, literature, everything. It's that which keeps them sane and makes them successful.”
Ruth looked doubtful. “Anglo-Saxon superiority?” she questioned. “Do you believe in Anglo-Saxon superiority? To be sure, we're always thanking Heaven that we're so much better than our neighbours; but apart from fond delusions, are we better?”
“You're at any rate fresher and lighter-hearted,” Bertram asseverated. “Englishmen always remain boys. We poor Continentals, especially we poor Latins, grow old and sad, or else sour, or else dry and hard. We take life either as a grand melodrama, or as a monotonous piece of prose; and it's all because we haven't your English way of taking it as a game—the saving spirit of sport.”
Ruth laughed a little. “Yes, and a good many Englishwomen remain boys, too,” she added musingly. “How is that beautiful dog of yours?” she asked. “Have you brought him with you to Florence?”
“Balzatore? No, I left him in Venice. He's rather a stickler for his creature-comforts, and the accommodations for dogs in Italian trains are not such as he approves of.”