“Remember me to her.” Then, looking at her husband as if to ask him whether she ought to say any more to me, she relapsed into silence, and fell to contemplating me again.
Fortunately Signor Cosimo relieved me from the embarrassment of choosing the subject of conversation by reverting to politics. The Tunis Question being then at its height, he naturally fell upon it tooth and nail, grew heated and excited, and blurted out, puffing and blowing, all his ideas touching foreign politics, concluding with the statement that if he and his brother the priest had been in the Cabinet, there would not be a Frenchman in Tunis.... At this point Signora Flavia interrupted him by asking me if there was any cotton in the material of my coat. I choked down a burst of laughter, and hazarded the answer that there was not.
“Then it is very dear, is it not?”
“Yes; I think it was seven francs a mètre.”
“Ah! they measure by mètres, do they? It must be good stuff, though. Just look, Cosimo; you ought to have one made like it——”
“Yes, yes; just like you—always interrupting! We’ll speak of that afterwards.”... Then, turning to me again—
“Because, if France——” He was just about to recommence the attack on Tunis when the door opened to admit his sister Olimpia, a maiden lady of fifty or so, the same whose literary reputation had made so great an impression on the peasants.
She had on a faded light blue dress, wore a crinoline, and carried a puce-coloured mantilla over her arm. On her head she had a broad-brimmed straw hat of a dingy yellow, adorned with a wreath of real ivy, and two small locks of well-greased hair fell in soft folds on the slightly roughened skin of her cheeks. In one hand she carried her parasol and a bunch of lavender; in the other a book, in which she kept her finger to mark the place. She advanced with ostentatious ease of manner, and bowed, half-shutting her eyes.
“Sir,” she said, “you are welcome to this modest habitation.”
“A delicious habitation, Signorina, where I should be very sorry to be troublesome.” She again half-shut her eyes, and smiled on me. Retiring backwards, as gracefully as she could, she went and sat down with her back to the window. She was evidently well acquainted with the clumsy artifices of a very mature young lady.