“It was yours then?” he said with an attempt at playfulness. “Gemma has been quite jealous of the unknown owner, but she says it is much larger than any of hers.” The girls’ eyes met but neither spoke, and Orazio babbled on, unheeding: “Her feet are carini, and I can span her ankle with my thumb and forefinger; but you are small made too, signorina.”
Carolina poked her head in at the door. “Al suo comodo è pronto,” she said, referring to the dinner, and hurried away again to dish up the veal cutlets.
The young man contrived to remain behind in the salotto for a moment and to keep Gemma with him. Olive looked at them as they took their places at table, and she understood that the girl had had to submit to some caress. She looked sick and her lips were quite white, and if Lucis had been a man of quick perceptions he would have realised, her face must have shown him, that she loathed him. He was dense, however, and though he commented on her silence later on it was evident that he attributed it to shyness.
Olive, thinking to do well, flung herself into the conversational breach. Her cousins had nothing to say, and the aunt’s thoughts were set on the dinner and cumbered with much serving. So she talked to him as in duty bound, and he seemed inclined to banter her.
Her feet, her temper, her relations with vetturini. He was execrable, but she would not take offence.
After dinner they all sat in the little salotto until it was time to go to the theatre, and still Olive talked and laughed with Orazio, teaching him English words and making fun of his pronunciation of them. Gemma watched her sombrely and judged her by her own standards, and Carmela caught at her cousin’s arm presently as they passed down the crowded Via Cavour together.
“Why did you make her so angry? She will always hate you now. I did not know you were civetta.”
Olive looked startled. “Angry? What do you mean?”
“Why did you speak so much to Orazio? Gemma thought you wanted to take her husband from her and she will not forgive.”
“Why, I could see it made her ill to look at him and that she shrank from his touch, and I did as I would be done by. I distracted his attention.”