Mr. Crevequer thought, but did not say, that she might have been more profitably employed in attending to the service than in watching the devout worshippers.
Mrs. Venables' niece, Prudence Varley, talked about Naples, with a certain careful accentuation of the purely ordinary point of view of the cultivated seer of sights. Her cousin Warren, watching her, smiled inwardly at the accentuation. He understood it perfectly well. There was in it a certain quality of externality that gained edge from the contrast with Mrs. Venables' all-reaching intimacy. It revealed, anyhow, how the Crevequers wallowed in ignorance—how they knew nothing. Museums, mosaics, pictures, sculpture, were to them less than names. Churches they knew only in so far as they went to church in them; and it was not from the point of view of one interested in worship, but in architecture, that Miss Varley seemed to approach the subject, differing herein from her aunt. When she discovered that the Crevequers knew nothing, she did not follow the subject; she gently fell again into her non-conversational attitude, which seemed almost a little abstracted. (She had often that air.) The Crevequers had indeed their own knowledge of Naples—none more so; but it was the intimacy of streets and corners, that close acquaintance with the face of a city which belongs to those who, as Warren Venables had said, 'drift about the bottom.' How should they know of mosaics? They knew every little narrow gradone, shut in with leaning houses, that led steeply up out of all the length of the Toledo, from Piazza San Carlo to the doors of the museum. (Beyond the doors their ignorance began.) They knew at what hour on Friday mornings it was most amusing to be playing round Porta Nolana; they knew the price at which you can get a plate of macaroni and a mezzo-litro of wine at all the trattorie (of any economy) in Naples, and at which you were most likely to meet amusing acquaintances, and at what hours. But it was possible that Miss Varley felt no more curiosity as to these things than the Crevequers as to the Angevin tombs in Santa Chiara. In Naples there seemed to be no meeting-ground, or none which Miss Varley cared to seek. It was Mrs. Venables who talked of Pompei—of the unique, almost oppressive, so she said, interest of it. The Crevequers knew Pompei as a place with nice hot, bright streets, scampered over by lizards, where it was agreeable to spend an afternoon among the gaily-hued, roofless houses, and go to sleep. But, they said, Christian Pompei was a better place—it had more variety. Here the gulf yawned aggressively; Mrs. Venables strove to throw a bridge by remarking that to some mental standpoints the present teemed with an eternal interest that quite obscured the past. The Crevequers supposed that this might be so.
Young Miranda Venables said that she thought the past was an awful bore. She did not approve of Naples; she was vexed at missing the hockey and beagling season at home, and she thought towns were beastly, especially Italian towns. She hated them. She looked towards the Crevequers with a rising of hope; here, it seemed, were two people who lacked intelligent interest even as she did. Miranda was, from her mother's point of view, a failure. She was in no way æsthetic, except sartorially. The Liberty frocks and flopping hats that her soul loathed seemed to give an edged incongruity to her pleasant round face, with its rosy cheeks and blue eyes, and mouth that drooped pathetically at the corners. She did not rebel against the bitter yoke of the picturesque: it was not worth while; she was merely used to remark, with her customary forcible elegance of phrase, that if her mother chose to spend money on making her look a guy, it was her look out, though Miranda considered it a pity that she could not get better value than that for her outlay. But her soul was not at all in her clothes; it was in quite different things—chiefly in hockey.
She raised that theme.
'I say, couldn't we get up a sort of a club? There must be a ground somewhere.'
But the Crevequers, it seemed, did not play hockey. It was sad how everywhere gulfs yawned. Miranda sighed, and fell back upon her lunch. That remains, even in Naples.
The Crevequers, on their side of the gulf, talked; they were really quite entertaining; their acquaintance included such various types of persons, their experience such interesting incidents. Some of the incidents revealed them, personally, in a light rather unusual—a light not apt, as a rule, to illumine a lunch-party. Of this they were sublimely unconscious; at their ignoring of it Warren Venables smiled a little. They were wholly innocent of the half-humorous, half-boastful posturing of the conscious rake; these things, assumed as the basis of their stories rather than narrated, were to them entirely natural—a matter of course. From the same outer darkness—Venables came to believe it was that—Tommy had discoursed of Marchese Peppino. It was not that they considered themselves reputable people, but simply that reputability (and the word includes in this case common honesty) was a thing wholly ignored by them, outside their sphere of knowledge. Certainly, such ignoring obviated embarrassment. Meanwhile, to entertain a tableful of strangers at lunch is an admirable gift. Mrs. Venables, possibly, did not sufficiently appreciate it; being amused came very much lower down on her scale of pleasures than being interested; it was perhaps fortunate, therefore, that it was a pleasure much rarer of attainment. She did not desire it of the Crevequers; she desired, as she phrased it, to draw them out, to achieve a near and serious intimacy.
When every one had finished eating too much (the Crevequers wondered to each other afterwards why it had come to an end just at that point, no sooner and no later; they themselves, once wound up to eat continuously, could have carried it on indefinitely), Mrs. Venables found a divan for herself and Betty in a secluded corner of the large hall, and continued the process of eduction. She had formed a plan; she wished of all things to come into contact with the real life of the people; she wanted Tommy and Betty to help her.
'You must be so delightfully intimate with them. With me they may be suspicious and reserved at first. And I am not at all completely mistress of the language. But I can at all events give them a very genuine sympathy and interest; and it would please me to try the experiment. I know something of our girls in London who work at the great factories. If we could form a sort of club here—social evenings, and so on—your help would be of immense value to me. You have achieved a real intimacy—you and your brother. To share the same faith must be a tremendous bond; there is no more tenacious or more beautiful tie, as Tolstoy says.... You remember the passage, perhaps?'
Betty shook her head.