When the truth about Camilla comes out, anybody may know how it happened that she received an education so immeasurably above that enjoyed by the rest of her family—as fine an education for a woman as Florence could afford. The elegant boarding-school where she lived ten months of the year, the Institut Heller, had a reputation to maintain.
Her two-months’ vacation Camilla spent at home, perforce, with her plebeian family, in the hot city.
The house stood in a wide, pleasant street, and had a handsome entrance. The main door, open all day, let you under a high arched way. The door to the ground floor gave on this, and the staircase climbed from it to the upper stories, each occupied by a different family. This passage ended in a court, with a plot of earth and an oleander or two; on this opened the modest quarters of the Bugiani, who in consideration of certain favors performed certain duties.
From all such Camilla was exempt. Antenore—Babbo, she called him—never suggested that she should work in the summer like Bianca, at straw-braiding or some such thing. It went against the grain, but what would you? Being reserved for a different destiny, she must not be creating for herself a past she might blush for, nor yet hardening her hands with labor. So she never answered the night ring at the big front door, never touched the huge pump-handle in the court, by which this house, boasting every modern convenience, was supplied with water in all its kitchens.
Every morning at nine she appeared in the portone dressed for the street, a picture of the well-born, well-bred young lady who never steps out unescorted. But where was her maid, where her duenna? About this matter there was simply nothing to be done. A bitter necessity to Antenore that his young daughters should run about Florence unattended—part of the hardship that drew from him so often the remark that Poverty is a Pig.
Had he been able, however, to keep a constant eye upon Camilla, he would have seen nothing to blame. She went quietly and swiftly, looking neither to right nor left, her well-brought-up eyes slid away from those of Man, appearing to prefer the paving-stones. She conducted herself like the young ladies of good family among whom she had lived; her clothes were such as theirs, their traditions had perfectly become hers; whether escorted or not, she was not to be taken for any but one of them.
Down the long street she walked to the Institut Heller, which occupied the first floor of a characteristic brown Florentine palazzo, at the corner of a wide sunny piazza with a marble-faced old church. Camilla went there to practise. As she had no piano at home, it had been arranged that she should continue during vacation to use the Pleyel upright in the school music-room, and incidentally redirect Mademoiselle Heller’s mail. The servant left as caretaker could neither write nor read.
So at nine daily Camilla would set forth, in a pale yellow batiste and a black hat with a plume, carrying gloves and a parasol. Her charming eyebrows were obscured by the “fringe” which had come into fashion—for this was 1879; a thick braid hung down her neck, where it was turned back and fastened with a velvet bow.
She was not yet very pretty. The green sepals wrapped the folded rose-leaves rather straightly, the future rose hardly yet knew itself to be a rose. Antenore had no such great need to feel uneasiness at the thought of bees and butterflies.
Her little head, of course, was full of the vague dreams of sixteen, which does not mean the dreams of a New England maiden of sixteen. Camilla’s grandmother had been married before that age, one of her schoolmates, only fifteen, had left school to become affianced; the Veronese Juliet, it will be remembered, was fourteen. Though Camilla fulfilled the European ideal of a jeune fille, unstained by so much as an unauthorized breath, and had the pretty, virginal air of such, she may be described, rather than as a stick of green wood, as a little bonfire in preparation—dry brush and resinous pine, all duly laid and for the present cold, but ready to sparkle and flame when the Torch should come.