Mae had been looking for Bero all that afternoon. She felt sure he would be there, and very soon she saw him among a crowd of officers sauntering slowly down the Corso. He looked up at the window opposite. The veiled lady leaned slightly forward and bowed and waved her white hand. Bero bowed. So did the other officers.
Norman Mann and Eric excused themselves long enough to dash over to welcome their friends and then stayed on for a little chat. These young women were quite gorgeous in opera cloaks and tiny, nearly invisible, American flags tucked through their belts. They tossed confetti down on every one’s heads, and shouted—a little over-enthusiastically, but one can pardon even gush if it is only genuine. That was the question in this case.
The horse race came; and Mae went fairly wild. When it was over, every body prepared to go home. King Pasquino had virtually abdicated in favor of the Dinner Kings. Mae unclasped her tightly strained hands, clambered down from a chair she had perched herself on, smiled a good-bye at the veiled lady, and came away. She rode home quietly with a big bouquet of exquisite blue violets in her hand. There was a rose on top and a fringe of maiden’s hair at the edge, and the bouquet was flung from Bero’s own hand up at the side window on the quiet Jesu e Maria, when everyone else but Mae was out on the Corso balcony.
“It is dreadful to grow old,” said Mae, breaking silence, as the carriage clattered over the stony streets.
“My dear,” expostulated Edith, “you surely don’t call yourself old. What do you mean?”
“I fancied I could take the Carnival as a child takes a big bonbon and just think with a smack of the lips, ‘My! how good this is.’ But here I am, wondering what my candy is made of all the time, and forgetting, except at odd moments, to enjoy myself for trying to separate false from true, and gold from gilt. Still, what is the use of this stuff now! I’ll remember that horse race, for there I did forget myself and everything but motion. How I would like to be a horse!” And the volatile Mae seized the stems of her bouquet for whip and bridle and gave a little inelegant expressive click-click to her lips as if she were spurring that imaginary steed herself.
Norman smiled. “We can’t keep children for ever, even—”
“The silliest of us?”
“Even the freshest and blithest.”
“O, dear, that is like a moral to a Sunday-school book,” said Mae; “don’t be goody-goody to-night.”