a chair of scarlet and gold than they would have allowed a curtain to hang after the sun had made a streak in it.
The girls were enchanted. “How delightfully dingy everything is!” Isabel cried. “It’s like grandmother’s beautiful cashmere shawl that is a hundred years old.”
And then the travellers were good enough to say that they were hungry, and would not be displeased if luncheon should be very prompt at the hour of noon.
“After this, you see, we shall sail right into your track without a break,” Mr. Vane said. “Your hours suit me perfectly; and whether it should be luncheon or dinner at noon does not make the least difference to me at this season. In cold weather I like a late dinner.”
“I think you will find the early dinner pleasanter in summer,” the Signora said; “that is, if you rise early. You will soon learn, if you have not learned already, to give up the heavy American breakfast, and so will be hungry by noon. That gives you the fresh of the morning free, with little digestive work to dull your activity, and the lovely evenings from five to eight or nine. If you wish to go out romancing by moonlight, the supper is just enough to content, without clogging. The next best plan is, coffee on waking, breakfast at ten, and dinner at four or five after your nap. I have tried all ways, and settled on the first for this country. Of course it wouldn’t answer for our indoor, chilly life at the other side of the world.”
“I do not like a four or five o’clock dinner,” Mr. Vane said with decision. “It is neither one thing nor the other; and I hate to go from the bed to the dinner-table.”
It was the Signora’s first house-keeping for any one but herself, and she was full of a pleasant anxiety. What solemn conferences she had with the donna, what explanations, what charges she gave! And how learned she became in matters to which before she had not given a thought! In such a dark and narrow street, in a dingy little shop, was to be found the best chocolate in Rome. In such another place, where you would least expect, they sold coffee of unimpeachable excellence, which, of course, one had roasted and ground in one’s own house. Another journey was made for tea. She became an object of terror to sellers of meat and vegetables, and fruit-venders trembled before her. To witness the scorn with which she rejected apricots that had not the precise cloudless sunset tint, peaches that were of a vulgar red and green complexion or too pale in hue, mandarins not sufficiently loose of skin and flattened at the poles, and grapes and figs that could not answer in the affirmative at least six stern questions, one would have supposed that she must have been accustomed to such fruits as grew in the Garden of Eden. As to wine, the story of its getting was an admirable illustration of moral pulley-power. A friend’s friend’s, etc., friend had two friends who owned vineyards and made wine, and one was famous for his white and another for his red. The first power in this machinery was a semi-weekly cup of tea which a certain respectable, antique bachelor had taken regularly with the Signora time out of mind, and, losing which, his life would have been quite disjointed. The flavor of the tea did not, of course, extend beyond him, but it influenced certain favors in his power
to grant, which, in turn, moved the next wheel; and so on, quite in order, till a way was made from certain cool grottos, where the hoarded wines sparkled to themselves in the dark, to the small dinner-table where our friends in the old Roman house sat and sipped liquid rubies or sunshine for an absurdly small price considering the result.
“But you are giving us too much of your time,” the Vanes expostulated. “We cannot permit you to turn housekeeper for us. How will you be able to write?”
For the Signora Ottant’-otto was an authoress. “In the first flush of seeing you I could not content myself to write a line,” she said; “and by the time I shall have become calm my machinery will be in working order. After that nothing will be necessary but an occasional warning word or glance.”