Violet looked much perplexed and disturbed. "Lulu, dear, it doesn't rest with me to decide the matter, you know," she said, in a soothing, sympathetic tone; "if it did, I should at once say you need not. But I will speak to grandpa and mamma about it."
"Well, Mamma Vi, if I must try it, won't you tell him beforehand that he is never to strike me? If he does, I'll not be able to restrain myself and I'll strike him back; I just know I shall. And then we'll all be sorry I was forced to take lessons of him."
"Oh, Lulu, my dear child, I hope you would never do that!" cried Violet in distress. "How would your father feel? what would he say when he heard of it?"
"I don't know, Mamma Vi, but I don't believe he would allow that man to strike me; and I dare say he would think I served him right if I struck him back. However, I don't mean to be understood as having formed the deliberate purpose of doing so; only I feel that that's what I should do without waiting a second to think."
Violet thought it altogether likely, and after a moment's cogitation promised that the signor should be told that he could have Lulu for a pupil only with the distinct understanding that he was never, on any account, to give her a blow.
"And, Lulu, dear," she added entreatingly, "you will try not to furnish him the slightest excuse for punishing you, will you not?"
"Yes, Mamma Vi; but I do want to escape taking lessons of him, for fear we might fall out and have a fight," returned the little girl, laughing to keep from showing that she was almost ready to cry with vexation at the very idea of being compelled to become a pupil of the fiery little Italian.
He was a diminutive man of rather forbidding aspect.
"I fear that in that case you would get the worst of it," Violet remarked, with a faint smile.
"He is only a little man, Mamma Vi," Lulu said, shaking her head in dissent; "the professor would make two of him, I think,"