After she was thoroughly toasted and had drunk a cup of Russian tea, Jean found her way up to the room that was to be hers during her visit. It was the sunniest kind of a retreat in daffodil yellow and oak brown. The furniture was all in warm deep toned ivory, and there were rows of blossoming daffodils and jonquils along the windowsills.
“Oh, I think this is just darling,” Jean gasped, standing in the middle of the floor and gazing around happily. “It’s as if spring were already here.”
“I put a drawing board and easel here for you too,” Cousin Beth told her. “Of course you’ll use my studio any time you like, but it’s handy to have a corner all your own at odd times. Carlota will be here tomorrow and her room is right across the hall. She has inherited all of her father’s talent, so I know how congenial you will be. And you’ll do each other a world of good.”
“How?”
“Well, you’re thoroughly an American girl, Jean, and Carlota is half Italian. You’ll understand what I mean when you see her. She is high strung and temperamental, and you are so steady nerved and well balanced.”
Jean thought over this last when she was alone, and smiled to herself. Why on earth did one have to give outward and visible signs of temperament, she wondered, before people believed one had sensitive feelings or responsive emotions? Must one wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve, so to speak, for a sort of personal barometer? Bab was high strung and temperamental too; so was Kit. They both indulged now and then in mental fireworks, but nobody took them seriously, or considered it a mark of genius. She felt just a shade of half amused tolerance towards this Carlota person who was to get any balance or poise out of her own nature.
“If Cousin Beth knew for one minute,” she told the face in the round mirror of the dresser, “what kind of a person you really are, she’d never, never trust you to balance anybody’s temperament.”
But the following day brought a trim, closed car to the door, and out stepped Carlota and her maid, a middle-aged Florentine woman who rarely smiled excepting at her charge.
And Jean coming down the wide center flight of stairs saw Cousin Beth before the fire with a tall, girlish figure, very slender, and all in black, even to the wide velvet ribbon on her long dark braid of hair.
“This is my cousin Jean,” said Mrs. Newell, in her pleasant way. She laid Carlota’s slim, soft hand in Jean’s. “I want you two girls to be very good friends.”