She could at any rate compare the different types of architecture. A friend of hers, a Mr. Bunning, said there wasn’t any architecture in Rome, but you could never be quite sure what Mr. Bunning meant. Edith hadn’t been quite sure for several years--nor apparently had Mr. Bunning, but perhaps their going to Rome might help him to find out. Agatha was very good-natured about it; she said she thought Rome would do as well as anywhere else.
The Pinsents were a most accommodating family and though, of course, they sometimes quarreled, it was all in a loud, direct, natural way, which generally ended in chaff.
They never quarreled with Rose as much as with each other because of her having been rather delicate, still they chaffed her a good deal. She wouldn’t have liked it if they hadn’t.
They knew they weren’t like other families of their class and standing; they prided themselves on talking to people in railway carriages and even crossing the Channel. Of course, they were particularly good sailors but even if they hadn’t been they would have been nice and friendly and not at all stuck up about being sick.
Agatha was thinking of marrying a Canadian who took most magnificent back-handers, Edith was still wondering what Mr. Bunning meant, but Rose was perfectly free.
She’d had two proposals, but both of them had been from men she had known all her life and liked most awfully--but not in that way. So that she’d had, as Mrs. Pinsent put it to her husband, “quite a lot of experience for twenty-one and none of the bother of it.”
Mr. Pinsent growled and said that if Rose married the right kind of man she never would have any bother.
Mrs. Pinsent looked thoughtful; she didn’t want to think that Mr. Pinsent was the wrong kind of man, it would have been dreadful after being married to him for thirty years. Still, she couldn’t honestly have said that she hadn’t had any bother with him.
Probably Mr. Pinsent had forgotten it; men do not remember that kind of thing in the same way.
They chose a French hotel in Rome because they thought it would be more Italian, and when they arrived there everything was just as foreign as possible, which was what the Pinsents wanted--provided that they could get enough hot water.