“Ah, there they are,” he cried. “And in Italy now there would be no snow. My father told me of the sparrows here. He said they were such quarrelsome and saucy birds that he really didn’t like them when he lived here. But now, not seeing them, he misses their chirping.”
“How queer it is,” Jean said, “I mean the way one remembers and loves all the little things about one’s own country.”
“Not so much all the country. Just the spot of earth you spring from. He loves New England.”
“And I love Long Island. I was born there, not at the Cove, but farther down the coast near Montauk Point, and the smell of salt water and the marshes always stirs me. I love the long green rolling stretches, and the little low hills in the background like you see in paintings of the Channel Islands and some of the ones along the Scotch coast. Just a few straggly scrub pines, you know, and the willows and wild cherry trees and beach plums.”
“Somewhere I’ve read about that—the earth’s hold upon her people. I’m afraid I only respond to New York’s rolling country, too. I’ve been so homesick abroad just to look at a crooked apple tree in bloom that I didn’t know what to do. Where were you born, Aldo?”
“At the Villa Marina. Ah, but you should see it.” Aldo’s dark eyes glowed with pride. “It is dull terra cotta color, and then dull green too, the mold of ages, I think, like the under side of an olive leaf, and flowers everywhere, and poplars in long avenues. My father laughs at our love for it, and says it is just a moldy old ruin, but every summer we used to spend there. Some day perhaps you could come to see us, Jean. Would they lend her to us for a while, do you think, Mrs. Newell?”
“I should love to. Isn’t it fun dreaming of impossible things like this?”
“Sometimes they turn out to be very possible,” Beth returned, whimsically. “Hopes to me are so tangible. We just set ahead of us the big hope, and the very thought gives us incentive and endeavor and punch. Plan from now on, Jean, for one spring in Italy. Then, maybe, some spring you’ll find yourself there.”
They arrived just a little late at the Morel studio. Jean had expected it to be more of the usual workshop, where canvases heaped against the walls seemed to have collected the dust of ages, and a broom would have been a desecration. Here, you ascended in an elevator, from an entrance hall that Beth declared always made her think of an Egyptian tomb.
When they reached the ninth floor, they found themselves in the long foyer of the Morel studio. Jean had rather a confused idea of what followed. There was the meeting with Morel himself, stoop-shouldered and thin, with his vivid foreign face, half-closed eyes, and sparse gray hair. Near him stood Madame Morel, with a wealth of auburn hair and big dark eyes. Aldo said to Jean just before they were separated, “He loves to paint red hair, and Aunt Signa says she has the most wonderful hair you ever saw.”