She paused, and I added, "Be a villain."
"So you see," she smiled, "how apropos my advice to you is: have nothing to do with foreigners."
I returned her the portrait without comment, kissed her good-night, and next day sailed out to sea, with Aunt Edith waving her handkerchief after me like a flag of warning. We lived in the country, six hours' ride from New York, and my oldest brother and Aunt Edith had followed me to the "water's edge," as she playfully expressed it. At London I was to join Cecilia Dayton, a handsome widow of forty-five, an old friend of ours, who was to act the part of "chaperone." We called her "St. Cecilia," although she was anything but saintly.
Late in the following winter we left Paris and went to Nice, where "the romance of a serviette" began; and I trust the reader will not question my truthfulness when I observe that what I am writing is, without exaggeration, strictly true.
St. Cecilia, from nervousness brought on by drinking strong tea (as I firmly believe), kept a small night-lamp burning in her room at night, so she should not be afraid to sleep. For this purpose she used tiny tapers, which float on the top of oil poured in a tumbler half full of water. We breakfasted in our own rooms, and the breakfast napkins of the Grand Hôtel, where we were stopping, were decidedly shabby and only about six inches square. On the morning of our leavetaking of Nice, St. Cecilia wanted a "rag" to tie over her bottle of oil, which she carried with her for her night-tapers, and cast her eyes about for one: she seized upon the raggedest of the serviettes.
"I don't consider this stealing, ma chère," she murmured in apology. "My bill is enormous! I feel that I've paid for this rag twice over."
So the serviette went with us by sea to Naples. There we were obliged for a time to occupy the same apartment, and the napkin taken off the bottle was lying about the room, for it was warm and there was no fire to throw it in. Tucking it away with soiled linen, it came back from the laundry clean and white, save one round oil-spot on it, and was thrown into my trunk along with the refreshed linen; and there it remained untouched until four months later, when I arrived at Vienna.
At Venice, Cecilia was obliged to return to Paris: she was to rejoin me a fortnight later at Vienna. Meantime, a young Englishwoman, Kate Barton, whose acquaintance we had made at Rome, was going to Vienna to join a party of cousins; and as we were both alone, we arranged to make the journey together. Kate was one of the merriest of English girls (a native, however, of Cape Town), a tall, rosy-cheeked blond, with a half dozen brothers distributed in the British army and provincial parliaments.
We left Venice at midnight in an Adriatic steamer, and arrived next morning at Trieste, a town which during our forced stay in it of forty-eight hours filled my mind with nothing but most disagreeable souvenirs. Life there was in complete contrast to the quiet, poetic, graceful existence at Venice, and the change from the one to the other had been so sudden as to act like a stunning blow. A detention caused by illness and the loss of a train through the purposed maliciousness of a hotel-waiter led to two results. One was our sending a telegram to the proprietor of the W——Hôtel in Vienna to inform him of the delay, as rooms had been engaged for us by a gentleman who was in the habit of lodging in that hotel when in Vienna, and who before leaving the city had shown the kind thoughtfulness of sending us a letter of introduction to the proprietor commending us to his courtesy. The other result was to bring about an acquaintance with a Prussian, Herr Schwager, which happened in this wise: Kate, whose wrath was fully aroused at the troubles we encountered in Trieste, was extravagant in her denunciations of those "horrid Germans" after we were once fairly seated in the cars bound for Gratz. Neither of us spoke German with any degree of ease or much intelligibility, and consequently gave vent to our opinions in plain English. A young man of a studious, gentlemanly appearance, but of unmistakable Teutonic descent, sat in one corner of the compartment, and from his frequent smiling at our talk I concluded that he understood English, and made bold to ask him if he did.
"Happily, I do," he replied, his handsome brown eyes twinkling with increased merriment, "and I am one of those 'horrid Germans.'"