"I had a very good view of the pattern they unknowingly worked between them because, in my curious too-quickly developed position in that house, I was again made the confidant. I was, 'Since mother has quarrelled with all her "in-laws," the only sensible man about the premises,' Fay herself said once; a bloodless and unenviable prerogative so unsuitable to Vitiali's temper that he had never troubled to stoop down to claim it from the heights where his good fortune had enthroned him. For who, able to be something better, would trouble himself to hold the mean place of 'the sensible man about the premises?' I've never been lured into it since, anyway.
"It was about a month later that, after a week in which I had not seen them, I called one afternoon and came face to face with Vitiali by the drawing-room door, which he had just closed behind him.
"I'm so glad you have come, Howard,' he said, with his affectionate smile, retaining my hand in his; we were great friends, you understand. 'I have just left Fay, looking exactly as though she were going to write a book or a tragedy. Oh, so serious!
"'Come on, quickly,' he said, catching me by the arm and hurrying me to the door. 'Let her see you before she takes a pen in her hand—let her see a man who actually has written something, and take warning.
"'Of course, you don't look like an author, old man,' he soothed my protest. 'You look just like any one else, but more sympathetic. That is why I am asking you to make Fay look not so serious—Oh, it's terrible, that quiet Fay seriousness!' He held me at arm's length with a sudden gesture. 'Can you make a woman laugh?' he asked.
"'I can do nothing else,' I answered.
"'Then, Howard, I shall count you not a good friend if Fay is not smiling all over her face when I come back to-night to take them out to dinner.' He had a delightful way of mock solemnity, which seemed to suit particularly his dark mobile features.
"'Quick, now, before she takes up that horrible pen!' and he opened the door and thrust me into the room. 'God be with you,' he whispered behind the closing door.
"What poor Carlo had helplessly called her 'seriousness' I had remarked about Fay just lately; and the forced comedy of my entrance to combat it was part of the woe-begone air with which he usually tried to appease and lighten it.... It was, as I had noticed, as though a fleeting shadow of thought, in brushing across her face, had been seduced to stay beyond its first impulse; and there's nothing in the world so satisfying to watch as a young serious loveliness, so it be without guile. I, as sometimes the four of us sat at the play (when of course I was Mrs. Richmond's companion in particular), in a side glance at her would catch the shadow of that thought, and it was as a delicate engravure on a lovely face; and I'd wonder what problem that dear mind was trying to work out—of course, bravely! You see? She was the sort of girl to induce a generous epithet about her every action, the sort that even great writers seldom show as anything but lay figures, simply because it needs a rare personal quality to create a perfect description of beauty together with simplicity and genuineness. I can't even attempt to do that, I'm content just to envy my youth her company, and curse it for its commonplace vigour which, ambitious in a busy world, thought of that girl as a playmate, instead of—oh, instead of as a mate!