“Well?” said Ferris.
“I wish you wouldn’t remember that I’ve asked this favor of you; that you’d consider it a”—
“Consular service? With all my heart,” answered Ferris, thinking for the third or fourth time how very young Miss Vervain was.
“You are very good; you are kinder than I have any right,” said Florida, smiling piteously. “I only mean, don’t speak of it to my mother. Not,” she added, “but what I want her to know everything I do; but it would worry her if she thought I was anxious about her. Oh! I wish I wouldn’t.”
She began a hasty search for her handkerchief; he saw her lips tremble and his soul trembled with them.
In another moment, “Good-morning,” she said briskly, with a sort of airy sob, “I don’t want you to come down, please.”
She drifted out of the room and down the stairs, the servant-maid falling into her wake.
Ferris filled his pipe and went out on his balcony again, and stood watching the gondola in its course toward the address he had given, and smoking thoughtfully. It was really the same girl who had given poor Don Ippolito that cruel slap in the face, yesterday. But that seemed no more out of reason than her sudden, generous, exaggerated remorse both were of a piece with her coming to him for help now, holding him at a distance, flinging herself upon his sympathy, and then trying to snub him, and breaking down in the effort. It was all of a piece, and the piece was bad; yes, she had an ugly temper; and yet she had magnanimous traits too. These contradictions, which in his reverie he felt rather than formulated, made him smile, as he stood on his balcony bathed by the morning air and sunlight, in fresh, strong ignorance of the whole mystery of women’s nerves. These caprices even charmed him. He reflected that he had gone on doing the Vervains one favor after another in spite of Florida’s childish petulancies; and he resolved that he would not stop now; her whims should be nothing to him, as they had been nothing, hitherto. It is flattering to a man to be indispensable to a woman so long as he is not obliged to it; Miss Vervain’s dependent relation to himself in this visit gave her a grace in Ferris’s eyes which she had wanted before.
In the mean time he saw her gondola stop, turn round, and come back to the canal that bordered the Vervain garden.
“Another change of mind,” thought Ferris, complacently; and rising superior to the whole fitful sex, he released himself from uneasiness on Mrs. Vervain’s account. But in the evening he went to ask after her. He first sent his card to Florida, having written on it, “I hope Mrs. Vervain is better. Don’t let me come in if it’s any disturbance.” He looked for a moment at what he had written, dimly conscious that it was patronizing, and when he entered he saw that Miss Vervain stood on the defensive and from some willfulness meant to make him feel that he was presumptuous in coming; it did not comfort him to consider that she was very young. “Mother will be in directly,” said Florida in a tone that relegated their morning’s interview to the age of fable.