She smiled indulgently on him. “Perhaps you’ve forgotten how, when I was a child, and when I had mince-pie for dinner, I used to slyly pick out the large raisins and put them under the edge of my plate to eat afterward. I recollect your finding me out once, and asking me if I didn’t like raisins, and I was in terror lest you were going to take them away from me. I’ve been doing the same thing now—saving the best for the last. I wished to dispose of everything else first, so that, when I return to America, I can shut my eyes in Rome, and not open them again till they see the shores of the New World. And, between ourselves, papa, isn’t it a dreadfully new world? I wouldn’t own it to a foreigner, of course; but you’re such a dear, stanch old Yankee!” And she leaned forward
and gave him an affectionate pinch in the cheek.
The younger sister turned quickly at that. “O Bell! don’t turn traitor,” she exclaimed. “Newness is not a disadvantage always. When the world was new the Creator praised it, but there is no record of his ever having praised it after.”
Mr. Vane looked at his younger daughter with a wistful, lingering smile. He always looked attentively at Bianca when she spoke.
Isabel lifted her hands in wonder. “Well, really, she is playing patriot! Who have I heard say that her body was born in America, but her soul in Italy? Who have I heard say that the children of Israel were not Egyptians, though they were born by the Nile?”
Bianca smiled to herself softly, and looked out of the window as she answered: “I am not playing patriot. The feeling was always in my mind, hanging there silent like a bell in its tower; and now and then it rang. It always rang when struck.”
“That’s my darling!” her father exclaimed. “Keep your sweet-toned patriotism in its bell-tower. I don’t like the sort that is always firing india-crackers under everybody’s nose. By the way,” he added after a while, rousing again, rather unaccountably, “what an absurdity it is in us, this coming to Rome in May! To-day is the second of the month. We should have come in December. I wonder I allowed myself to be so persuaded. I have a mind to go back at once.”
His elder daughter regarded him tranquilly. “Don’t excite yourself unnecessarily, papa,” she said; “we are behind a coachman who never turns back. By the time we reach Rome you will be as contented as a lamb. Do not you perceive something
beautiful in our coming at this season, with the orange-flowers and the jasmines? We do not arrive, we simply bloom. Even dear old papa will put on a film of tender green over his sombreness, like a patriarchal spruce-tree; and as to Bianca and me—”
She sang: