“Oh, take him to the Boboli Gardens, and that sort of thing—he likes outdoors and isn’t too keen for pictures—and we’ll walk. . . . Where is that little place where you buy cakes, down in that covered street near the Arno?”
It seemed queer to have her ask that—I remembered so clearly her saying that she thought eating in alleys odd—but I didn’t remind her, and I told her about that, and about a place where you could get the best white wine, and then of a restaurant where Sam had taken me that was always full of Italian artists, and writers and poets, and where you never saw the gleam of a red Baedeker.
“He likes that sort of thing,” Leslie confided, “and I want him to have a good time—”
“Of course,” I answered.
She sighed, and then smiled in a sort of a foolish way. “It’ll be nice to see him,” she said weakly.
“I should think it would be,” I answered.
“He’s thirty-three,” she said, “but what’s ten years?” (Leslie is twenty-three)
“Nothing,” I stated. It was easy to say the right thing to her that day, for she put up a sign post at every turn.
“I think a man should be older than a woman—” said Leslie. I suppose she meant husband and wife.
“I do too,” I agreed, and did an arpeggio.