And I never heard anything like the outburst that followed! They both got up and clutched my sleeves, and pointed their hands that were full of bird-lunch, and nodded their heads and patted my back, and kept explaining—in forty-seven ways—where the mail box was. It was really very funny, and I thought I was never going to get away!
After I did—and I hadn’t half as much idea of where the box was as I had when I stopped—I went on, and after while I saw something that looked suspicious, and after I saw a woman drop a postcard in it, I dropped my letter, and then turned.
Going back, I waved at the old ladies, and said “Grazie,” which I had learned meant thank you, and they bobbed their heads and called, “Niente, niente, Signorina!”
Then a group of soldiers from the ranks clattered past me in their olive drab and the heavy shoes that announce their coming, and again I was at the doorway through which I could reach the Pension Dante, wondering whether it was really true, or whether my program had slipped to the floor during the first act?
And then I rang the pension bell and went in and up.
Going in, and away from all the shrill, staccato street noises, and the smells—which sometimes aren’t nice, but are always different—going in and away from all this seemed tame, but after I got up and Beata had opened the door, I was glad I had been decent enough to consider Miss Julianna’s feelings because—
Miss Leslie Parrish, of Oyster Bay, Long Island, and Miss Viola Harris-Clarke, of Ossining, New York, had arrived! I heard them before they heard me, which is, perhaps, unfair, but it is sometimes also a decided advantage, and I needed all the advantages on my side! I knew it as soon as I heard them speak, and that they would probably consider me countrified and make fun of me. I didn’t care, but I was glad to get used to the idea of our being so different, before we met and I was plumped up against all that manner at one time.
It didn’t take a Signorina Sherlock Holmes to know that they had come, and I didn’t need Beata’s wild pointing, for I heard their voices immediately although they were in a room that was well down the hall.
The first thing I heard was, “Simply impossible!” (I knew in a second that it was Leslie, and that it was her comment about the room) “You mean to say,” she went on, “that my aunt has seen this?”
“Si, Signorina,” Miss Julianna answered, and she didn’t sound as if she were smiling.