“Certainly not,” Leslie answered haughtily.
“Ah, how greatly then do I pity you! To hear yourself play! Oh, my!” (And again he clasped his forehead and rolled his eyes at the ceiling) “And also, you improve on Mr. Bach,” he went on, after his tragedy moment was past. “It is very kind of you to show the master how he should do. No doubt he is grateful! I think he turn in the grave. . . . Mr. Paderewski have great sense; to work for a country who is lost is better than to teach some I have met. . . . Oh, my! Some fool teach you that in girls’ school? You will drop airs with me, and play what is upon the sheet. You see?”
Leslie, with scarlet cheeks, and bright, angry eyes, got up, and nodded. Then Viola was summoned, and I felt most sorry for her because she had no nerve and she wobbled all the way over to the piano, but she did better than either Leslie or I, and she got off with “Skip that and thanks to heaven it will be shorter!”
And so ended that hard half hour that seemed hours long, and started all our winter’s work in Florence.
CHAPTER NINE
A STROLLING PICNIC
After we had made a slinking exit that took us into the outer room, and the girl, at a nod from Signor Paggi, had put our names down in the book and given us slips upon which were our names and lesson hours, we started down stairs and no one said a word. I think we would have kept quiet for a long, long time if I hadn’t started laughing, but I did—very suddenly and without really knowing that I wanted to—and Viola, after a moment, joined me in a weak, close-to-hysterical way. Leslie didn’t laugh and her eyes were hard and her chin set, and she was so angry that she walked as if she had been wound up too tightly. She made me think of “Mr. Wog,” a mechanical toy man, that the twins start into the living room from the dining room door sometimes when Roberta has company. It makes her very angry, because she says it looks so silly, and she says that it naturally embarrasses a man to realize that some one has been listening to every word he said. The twins told me that they wait around in the dark under the dining room table until they hear the caller tell Roberta that she is so sympathetic, or beautiful, or that they have long admired her, and then they crawl out with their wound toy and start it in. Louise, who is the elder by two minutes, said that “Mr. Wog” almost always broke into Roberta’s soft, “Oh, do you think so?” and that they always had to stuff their handkerchiefs right into their mouths to keep from screaming with giggles.
But to get on, Leslie walked as Mr. Wog walks, and when she spoke she did so between sharply indrawn breaths and in a way that told a lot she didn’t trouble to put into words.
“Aunt Sheila knew this old devil—” she said, “I make no apologies for calling him that—and what she did was vicious, positively vicious! She—she said I wouldn’t stick, made me say I would, in fact—” (she paused, and had to draw several quieting breaths before she could go on) “in fact I wagered her a cottage that father gave me last birthday, a heavenly sweet place up on Lake Placid, I wagered her that, that I would stick it out and study with this horrible person! . . . And if I can ever punish Ben Forbes for all this, I will consider that life has given me—all the sweetness I shall ever crave!”
Then we stepped out into the street.
Of course it seemed about sixteen times as bright as it really was, because both the halls and Mr. Paggi’s rooms had been dark, and it seemed more good to be out than I can describe. After I blinked my eyes into adjustment with the outdoor glare, I stole a side glance at Leslie and wondered what sticking it out—if she could stick it out—would do for her? I knew that she would either flare up and leave it all, or that she’d have to change, and I remembered how Howard McDonald, who is Elaine’s brother, had learned to keep his temper by playing baseball. The training, and the having to abide by decisions that he thought unfair had been fine for him, and after a season of playing short-stop, everybody wondered whether he had changed, or whether they’d been mean? “Will you—can you stand it?” I questioned inside, and Leslie answered, almost immediately, quite as if I’d put my wonder into words.