“Did you notice how she beckoned?” the Signora asked. “I always notice that here. They beckon as if indicating the feet, the palm of the hand being downward, the fingers toward the ground. We beckon with the palm and fingers upward, indicating the head. It used to confuse me, and I fancied myself sent away with a refusal when I was invited to enter. You will have to learn their signs. A certain shrug and raising of the eyebrows mean no. Another no—an odious one to me—is to wag to and fro the uplifted forefinger of the right hand. This is nearly always accompanied by a compression or puckering up of the mouth. But, my dear friends, it is time for luncheon. Shall we go?”
They rose slowly, and slowly strolled across the open space where art and nature lived peacefully together. No busy hands and spades uprooted the plots of wild-flowers,
infantile little pink convolvuli, snowy daisies, and all their blue and yellow kin, that had sprung up here and there in the gravelled plain, or the detached tiny plants that make each its own solitude, spreading its small leaves out over the pebbles, and raising its delicate head freely, as if to induce the passer-by to pause and admire for once the exquisite grace of the weeds he despised.
“I wonder if any one but Ruskin ever stopped to look at weeds!” the Signora said. “It was he, I think, taught me. I first thought of it on seeing an illustration in Modern Painters. It was a bit of weed-covered earth seen close, as one would see it when lying on the ground—only a little tangle of leaves and grasses; but, touched by his pen and pencil, its beauty was revealed.”
“I sometimes think,” Bianca said, “that it is a mercy we cannot see all the beauty there is about us; for, if we did, we should do nothing but stand and stare for ever.”
“One might do worse than stand and stare at beauty for ever,” her father replied. “I’ve no great opinion of business.”
She slipped her hand in his arm before answering, knowing that inaction was a subject that always found him a little sensitive. “That depends, you know,” she said. “When the business is to make your tea or hem your handkerchief, why it wouldn’t do for me to be going into trances.”
Isabel took his other arm. “But when the business is measuring places for the pleasure of knowing and telling how large they are, or when it is taking the census, or any of those countings of units, then he despises it.”
“When the business is poking a
nose in other people’s business, I certainly object to it,” he said.