“Can the groom take the cart home, Filippo? We will walk back with them.”
“Yes, Bellina is in spirits, but she will not run away from Giovanni,” he said, trying not to seem surprised that she should curtail their drive.
They crossed the wide gravelled space outside the gardens and walked towards the town by the Lung’Arno. Already the cypresses of San Miniato showed black against the sky, and the reflected flame of sunset was dying out in the windows of the old houses at the river’s edge. All the people were going one way now, and leaving the tree-shadowed dusk for the brightly-lit streets, Via Tornabuoni, all palaces and antiquity shops, and Piazza Vittorio Emanuele, where the band would play presently.
The two American girls walked together with Don Filippo and Olive followed them. Edna held herself very erect, but Mamie seemed almost to lean backwards. She swayed her hips as she went and swung her short skirts, and there was affectation and a feverish self-consciousness in her every movement. Olive could not help smiling to herself, but she remembered that at school she had been afflicted with the idea that a pout—the delicious moue of fiction—became her, and so she was inclined to leniency. Only seventeen.
The Prince wore riding gloves, and so the green gleam of his emerald was hidden from her. If only she could be sure that she had seen him before. What then? Nothing—if she could think that he would always be kind to gentle little Edna.
Just before they reached the hotel Miss Marvel joined her, leaving her cousin to go on with Don Filippo, and began to talk to her.
“The river is just perfect at this hour. Our sitting-room has a balcony and I sat there last night watching the moon rise over San Miniato. I guess it looked just that way when Dante wrote his sonnets. Beatrice must have been real mad with him sometimes, don’t you think so? She must have been longing to say, ‘Come on, and don’t keep talking.’ But she was a nice high-minded girl, and so she never did. She simply died.”
“If she died for him she must have been a fool,” Olive said shortly. Her eyes were fixed on the Prince’s broad back. He was laughing at some sally of Mamie’s.
Edna was shocked. “Don’t you just worship Dante?”
“Yes, yes,” answered the elder girl. “He was a dear, but even he was not worth that. At least, I don’t know. He was a dear; but I was thinking of a girl I knew ... perhaps I may tell you about her some day.”