“Certainly, that’s understood. Have to with you—” (She always resented and never understood why my first thought had to be music) “And another thing,” she went on, and she fumbled in the front of her negligee to find a cablegram, “I’ve heard from him—”
I took it and read it.
“He must have cared a lot to write those two pleases in a cablegram,” I said.
She nodded and tried not to smile, but the inclination was so much stronger than her ability to hold it in check, that she smiled in a silly, ashamed sort of way, and she avoided meeting my eyes.
Ben Forbes had cabled, “Thank you. Letter follows. Please please write me again.”
“I thought I’d get Beata a silver coffee service,” said Leslie, who can’t seem to accommodate to other people’s circumstances.
“She’d never use that,” I said. “You might as well get her a wooden leg or a pair of stilts! I’d get her some horrible picture, or candlesticks for their front room, or a lamp with a funny, warty, red and green shade—”
“You’re right,” she said, and then she went off. She kissed her fingers to me from the doorway, and again she smiled in that misty, vacant way.
I practised hard, for that afternoon I had a lesson, and it was that afternoon that Signor Paggi began to be most kind to me.
“You have more feel in the tune,” he said. (I was very happy) “I think Cupeed have come to make you see—” he went on.