‘One must marry some one,’ said her companion.
Mr. Melville relieved the tension by inquiring, ‘And who was the hero of this episode, Miss Marcia? We have not heard his name.’
Marcia laughed good-humouredly. ‘Your friend Mr. Dessart.’ The Melvilles exchanged glances. ‘I met him in the gallery, and as the carriage hadn’t come and Gerald was playing in the fountain and Marietta was flirting with a gendarme (Dear me! Aunt Katherine, I didn’t mean to say that), we strolled about until the carriage came. I’m sure I had no intention of shocking the Italian nobility; it was quite unpremeditated.’
‘If the Italian nobility never stands a worse shock than that, it is happier than most nobilities,’ said her uncle. And the simultaneous announcement of M. Benoit and dinner created a diversion.
It was a small party, and every one felt the absence of that preliminary chill which a long list of guests invited two weeks beforehand is likely to produce. They talked back and forth across the table, and laughed and joked in the unpremeditated way that an impromptu affair calls forth. Marcia glanced at her uncle once or twice in half perplexity. He seemed so entirely the careless man of the world, as he turned a laughing face to answer one of Mrs. Melville’s sallies, that she could scarcely believe he was the same man who had spoken so seriously to her a few minutes before. She glanced across at Sybert. He was smiling at some remark of the contessa’s, to which he retorted in Italian. ‘I don’t see how any sensible man can be interested in the contessa!’ was her inward comment as she transferred her attention to the young Frenchman at her side.
Whenever the conversation showed a tendency to linger on politics, Mrs. Copley adroitly redirected it, as she knew from experience that the subject was too combustible by far for a dinner-party.
‘Italy, Italy! These men talk nothing but Italy,’ she complained to the young Frenchman on her right. ‘Does it not make you homesick for the boulevards?’
‘I suffered the nostalgie once,’ he confessed, ‘but Rome is a good cure.’
Marcia shook her head in mock despair. ‘And you, too, M. Benoit! Patriotism is certainly dying out.’
‘Not while you live,’ said her uncle.