A Florentine Episode: In Two Parts. Part First

“ LET me see,” said Mr. Mortimer Mayo, with a sudden air of business, “ what is it I owe you, Keith ? ”

Two men, one of fifty and the other of less than half that age, were crossing the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, in the direction of the Loggia. The question had come from the elder, who was of medium height; was dressed with immaculate elegance; wore a blonde mustache and beard, the latter trimmed neatly to a point, after the fashion of certain portraits ; and had a pair of wide-awake blue eyes, which added to the effect his whole air gave of alert readiness to perform his every duty to the most microscopic detail. This was Mortimer Mayo, sometime New Yorker, but now nothing if not cosmopolitan. His companion, Keith Tresillian, was half a head above him, with a slender figure, a beardless face tanned by exposure, brown eyes whose expression in a way suggested that of a fine dog’s, well-cut features, thick chestnut hair, and a half-careless habit of dress, if one judged by his manner of wearing his hat pushed far back on his head.

“ Since you ask me,” he drawled indifferently, “ I believe you owe me three hundred and fifty francs. I happened to be making up my accounts this morning.”

“ I am glad to hear it. I advise every young man to acquire systematic habits in regard to everything connected with money. You have worked me so hard I have not been able to keep any arithmetic in my head. Three hundred and fifty francs! Suppose, Keith, just for convenience’ sake, we make it five hundred ; then, without being bothered by calculations, I shall know that I owe you exactly a hundred dollars.”

“ I have not so much about me,” Keith replied, “ but I might step back to Maquay & Hooker’s and draw.”

“ But we shall need money for this excursion to Prato,” said Mayo, lively alarm depicted on his face. “ A party of eight women is expensive.”

“ I ’m not going.”

“ Not going? You must go. You ungrateful fellow, I contrived the affair for your entertainment.”

“ Thank you so much. Not to-day.”

“ But my dear Keith ! fancy me with Mrs. Girard and her five daughters on my hands ! And as I thought my boy would be along to settle, as usual ”—

In the smile which lurked about the young fellow’s lips, as he put his hand into his pocket, his good nature was apparent, but also a touch of irony, which did not, however, disconcert Mayo, who regarded money from a serious standpoint. having long since made a compromise between his principles and his necessities.

“ How much shall I give you ? ” Keith asked.

“ Plenty of five-franc pieces, not to say francs and half-francs. There will be all sorts of fees, and as by rights it is your party, I must be liberal.”

Keith produced a handful of coins and a bank-bill, which Mayo accepted with an air of relief.

“ You will make a note of it?” he hastened to say, with the anxiety of a systematic man who leaves nothing at loose ends. “ But what a pity that you will not come ! ”

“ I have another engagement.”

Mayo looked frankly surprised, and well he might, at this sudden show of independence in the listless young fellow to whom he had been devoting himself for a week past with a zeal and disinterestedness he found fairly affecting now that Keith seemed inclined to shake off the yoke. He had discovered the young Philadelphian’s name on the books of the Hotel Europa, and, looking him up. had claimed him as a cousin in a remote degree. Mrs. Tresillian, the young man’s mother, at present lingering in Siena with a sick member of her party, on hearing of the encounter had written a pretty letter to her “ cousin Mortimer,” expressing relief that her boy had come across somebody friendly and akin who would keep him out of scrapes. Thus Mayo, accepting this arduous responsibility, had scarcely allowed the young fellow out of his sight. What possible engagement could Keith have made ? However, Mortimer Mayo possessed invincible tact.

“ All right,” he said, with an air of bonhomie in which he was excelled by no man. “ I am glad you have picked up some pleasant acquaintance. Not but that your conscience ought to prick you a little, for those pretty Girard girls” —

“ I beg pardon,” said Keith, “ I must go.”

“ I shall sit down and wait for Mrs. Girard in the Loggia, ” said Mayo, with an air of fortitude.

Keith nodded and passed on with great strides, and Mayo, casting a glance after his charge, saw him buying a bunch of carnations in the open porticoes of the Uffizi. He could not help observing as well that Keith’s air of listlessness already seemed cast off as a garment, now that he had some object in view. Noblesse oblige must, however, be Mr. Mortimer Mayo’s motto, and nothing could induce him to spy upon any man’s diversions.

Keith ran up the stairs of the great palace two steps at a time, and, passing through the two vestibules, entered the broad entrance corridor, hung with the woks of the earliest masters. There was a palpable relief in cutting himself free from Mr. Mortimer Mayo, who had enjoyed dancing him about like a puppet, while, stiff with the solidity of exact facts, dates, and “ schools,” that gentleman had delivered succinct opinions on nature and art gleaned from the best sources. Not that Keith had cared for such minor grievances, in the fit of restlessness and despair which had taken possession of him since Miss Rose Bellew had told him he was too young, too ineffective, to answer her ideals of the man she could marry. His thoughts had revolved round his own shortcomings ; he had constantly pondered his weaknesses, like a fate-beleaguered Hamlet, appointing himself trials and penances. Miss Bellow had rejected Keith in the cathedral at Orvieto a fortnight before, and in the eternity of upheaval and chaos which had intervened he had been the prey of inextinguishable regrets. Yet at this moment, as he walked down the corridor toward the Tribuna, he was conscious of a lightening of heart as he recognized the object of his search, whose acquaintance he had made the day before at the Accademia, in a brief absence of his Mentor.

“ Yes, there she is,” he said, pausing, and gazing with a smile at a copyist sitting on a high stool before a sweet, crude fourteenth-century Annunciation, Which, with brush uplifted, she was studying as if trying to tear the very heart out of it. There was an individuality quite peculiar and piquant about the girl, who looked very young, and the fantastic little figure must have arrested any one’s attention. She was very slight, and her hands and feet were unusually small. She had a round babyishly pretty face, fine features, soft chubby cheeks like a fruit, eyes of the deepest blue with inordinately long and thick lashes, and a pathetically wistful little mouth. Her dress, Keith observed with amusement, was the same she had worn the day before, to his perception made up of shreds and patches, but a sort of poetic apparel, nevertheless, with an effect of picturesqueness and ease which he admired. It consisted of a skirt of dark blue stuff, a white silk blouse with a flowered neckerchief tied about the throat, a huge scarlet apron with richly embroidered pockets and ruffle of wide lace, while on the clustering brown curls, cut short like a child’s, was perched a scarlet cap.

While she sat gazing at her copy, a Memmi, through the slits of her halfclosed eyes, her head a little on one side, Keith sat down on the steps of a tall unoccupied easel which stood near, and waited. All at once she jumped off her perch, and darting to a little distance regarded the picture in a new light; this gained, she flew back to her canvas and made a few swift fierce stabs with her brush in the face of the Virgin, then relapsed into a leopard-like repose, never wholly quiescent, but suggesting the possibility of a second spring.

“ Good - morning, Miss Pliillimore,” said Keith, then, and not till then, breaking in upon her work.

She transferred her attention to him, smiled lazily, took a card out of her pocket, looked at it, and returned,—

“ Good - morning, Mr. Keith Tresillian.”

He laughed.

“ So you had quite forgotten my name! ”

“ How could I remember such an odd name ? ” she rejoined, with an air of infantile candor. “ I ’m not an intellectual prodigy.”

“ It is not so musical a name as Phillis Phillimore,” Keith observed. “ That haunted my dreams like a strain of music,”

“ I did not tell you my name was Phillis,” said the artist.

“ But your color-box did. How good of you to lose it yesterday ! ”

“ How good of you to find it ! ”

“ I confess I had been longing for an excuse to address you. I had been watching you for an hour, puzzling over your nationality. Had you noticed me ? ” “ Of course I had not noticed you,” said Miss Phillimore loftily. “ Why should I ? ”

“ Nevertheless I felt as if I had attracted your attention. I dreaded lest my proximity might annoy you.”

“ I was conscious that I could not make a telling stroke. It is always so when anybody who represents philistinism, convention, high fashion, is looking on.”

“ Surely you are not alluding to me ? ”

“ But really, now, are n’t you an elegant, fastidious, highly connected young man of wealth and fashion ? ” she demanded naively.

“ As to being well connected, I assure you nobody consulted me before I was born, and I was obliged to accept all my relations ready-made. As to my being elegant and fashionable, I give you my word that everything I do, say, or put on is apt to be pointed out by the knowing in such matters as what wise men avoid.”

“ But aren’t you an idler ? ”

“ I have dawdled about for a year, but this is my holiday. Until now it has been nothing except dig, dig, dig, with me, since I was six years old.”

“ But I know,” Miss Phillimore persisted in her indictment, “ that you are rich.”

“ My mother does provide me with reasonable pocket-money, — that I am compelled to acknowledge,” said Keith, — “ and I have a little something of my own. I see that you despise me,”

“ Oh, no,” answered Miss Phillimore nonchalantly. “ I should rather like to be rich myself, and sit down and bully mankind to give me whatever I wanted.”

“ Come, now! Do I sit down and bully mankind ? ”

She nodded, making at the same time a slight grimace. Keith said to himself that she was as refreshingly impertinent as her get-up was genuinely artistic. He had of late been so dreary, out of conceit with himself, tasting everything with a distempered appetite, that this encounter was just what he needed to pique him into trying to go on living.

“ But I am hard at work, don’t you see ? ” she now remarked. “ You must not interrupt me.”

“ I ’m a stock, a stone, — blind, deaf and dumb. Don’t pay the least attention to me. I see that you are painting another ugly Annunciation.”

“ I am painting all the Annunciations.”

“ You have a life-task before you ! ”

She uttered a quick sigh.

“ If only I might spend my life that way! ” she said. ”I have lost so much time, I have made so many attempts, I have had so many ambitions. For a whole year I painted nothing but Giorgiones. I could not sleep at night for thinking about the secret of his color. The way the hair lies against the forehead of the Knight of Malta, for example, would go through me like a knife. I assure you I have had my despairs. Then I gradually made up my mind to content myself with the joy, the thrill, the rankling sting, the deep-down unutterable heart of art. For, talk as you will about form, color, technique, handling, it is the world-joy, the world-pain, an artist has got to express, or die for it,—the beauty which we see only by snatches, which beckons but eludes us, which our hands cannot reach nor our lips press, yet which is the supreme part of our lives.”

The tears stood in her eyes as she looked at Keith ; her color came and went.

“ Accordingly,” she went on, to his relief, without waiting for him to respond to this outburst, “ I like to copy the early Nativities and Annunciations, to study first one and then another, and to see how, with the same impulse and the same appeal to sympathy, they show such a different intellectual quality and such a different spiritual touch. Then it is curious to see how the great masters took their compositions ready-made from the early painters. I suppose that in the first gropings of artistic feeling for expression, when men only tried reverently and devoutly to put down the vision which burned achingly in upon their own souls, they had a passionate insight into the wonder and the mystery of the miracles which nobody can have after becoming familiarized with such ideas. So when men found out the secrets of color and form, they simply repeated over and over again what the early artists had felt.”

She went on noting the resemblances and differences, — was enthusiastic over Tintoretto’s Annunciation, which was so beautiful and so original, and Leonardo’s, which was so subtly expressive, — all the time painting, now with frenzy, then again holding herself back and giving an occasional rhythmical stroke, touching and retouching certain parts. Keith had no real knowledge of art, keen of eye and fond of beauty as he was, but his impression was that, in spite of her passionate relish for her work, she painted rather badly. Yet it was so apparent that her heart helped every stroke of her brush that it pained him when presently she dropped her hands, exclaiming, —

“ Well, another failure ! ”

“ Do not say that,” he said eagerly.

“ What is one more failure, when already I have several hundreds of them piled up in my room ! I have had the experience, and I have almost come to the conclusion that it is hardly worth while to attempt anything in art, — that feeling is enough. Without coming to Italy one knows nothing, nothing. Even in Paris art is only the bubble on the surface ; here it is the wine of life itself. Yet if one stays in Italy, one stays at the risk of losing all one’s individual powers. One becomes so saturated with impressions, and such beautiful impressions, that one is content to go on repeating ideas which were a part of the universal air centuries before we were born. Nobody could possibly have an original thought in Italy; but who wants one? Sometimes I have flattered myself that I had caught hold of something hitherto ungrasped. Once, for example, standing before Leonardo’s Annunciation, it came over me what that angel’s message meant to the Virgin. Hitherto she had been a happy young girl, like other girls, with a lover, and with expectations of a life like other women’s. Then all at once she received tidings that she was consecrated, set apart, separated from the common lot. It struck me that no painter had adequately expressed her wonder and awe, her submission, yet almost painful amazement. I quite tingled with the force of my vital idea. Then a suspicion dawned on me that I was, as usual, warming up somebody else’s discovery, and I remembered that in George Eliot’s diary there is an account of the same thought stirring her as she stood before Titian’s Annunciation in Venice, and of how she made it the germ of her Spanish Gypsy. And I dare say hundreds of other people had been impressed by the same fancy before. No, it is all of no use. Had I never come to Italy, I might have had an identity and done something out of my own brain. Here I am a mere bundle of worn-out impressions and enthusiasms. Don’t you feel like taking a walk in the Boboli Gardens ? I have a pass.”

“ With all my heart,” replied Keith. “ Art is long and time is fleeting, and it is not always June in Florence.”

“ But then in Florence,” said Miss Phillimore, “art and nature are so jumbled together you can hardly tell where one ends and the other begins.”

Keith suggested the necessity of some luncheon, whereupon she explained that she always carried a sandwich in her bag, for the sake of convenience, to say nothing of economy. It was agreed that Keith should run out and buy a pâté, and meet her at the entrance to the Gardens, after she had crossed leisurely to the Pitti by the covered gallery.

Thus, an hour later, the two young people were sitting on the stone steps near the palace, eating the luncheon which Keith had provided with a lavishness to which his companion declared she was absolutely unaccustomed.

“ I do not know luxuries by sight! ” she cried, aghast.

“ Still,” pleaded Keith, “somehow things to eat always look so familiar.”

She conceded that hitherto slumbering instincts were roused in her by the sight of the pâtés, and indeed she even took kindly to a galantine. They were sitting where, in old court days, noble Florentine dames used to enjoy the revels. At the left was the palace ; at the right, groups of tapering cypresses, black as night, clipped ilex hedges, and thickets of bays and acacias shivering in the breeze ; through the vista opening between rose the cathedral dome, the Campanile, and the Palazzo Vecchio; beyond the city, the eye followed the glimmering plain to the lapis-lazuli-colored hills. The blue sky was flecked with little clouds with the very spirit of the summer wind in their fleeces, and everything, gardens, city, valley, and mountains, basked in sunlight and glittered in intense brilliancy of hue.

Keith absorbed these outside impressions, which went to make up the completeness of air experience which certainly possessed all the charm of the unexpected. Miss Phillimore was the very opposite of all that he had hitherto admired in woman. Fancy Rose Bellew picking up an acquaintance in a picturegallery, and eating a luncheon with him next day, unchaperoned ! Yet Miss Phillimore seemed to require none of those adjuncts which are supposed to enhance the charm and naïveté of young girls. She was quite as much at home here as in the Uffizi. She had left her apron and cap behind with her color-box, and had put on a sailor-hat, which made her a little more like ordinary folk. Keith had at first sight taken her for a Frenchwoman, or possibly a German, while she had believed him to be an Englishman. So soon as they knew each other for compatriots they were friends, and their intimacy grew each moment. Lingering over their picnic, she addressed him with unhesitating frankness, asking him any question her curiosity suggested, and on her own side wholly banishing mystery.

She had been born and had lived all her days in Ohio, until five years before she had joined a “ personally conducted ” party which was to make the “ grand tour ” in sixty days for the sum of five hundred dollars. She told Keith that from the moment of landing in Europe she had hated being driven hither and thither, as if she were one of a flock of sheep, and that so soon as she had crossed the Alps and descended into Italy such bondage became impossible. She saw the vines festooning the trees and hanging in garlands, the peasants picking mulberry leaves for the silkworms, or weeding the wheat, down whose alleys poppies made a blaze of color ; she saw the cypresses, the ilexes, the olive-trees glittering as if inclosed in a net of transparent silver ; she saw the sky, the hills, — two blues, one full of sunlit azure, the other of liquid purple; she saw the cities, with their bridges, their churches, their picture - galleries, and their gardens, and she declared she would stay in Italy. And here she had stayed, except for a few months at a time in France and Germany, ever since. Why should she not make a snatch at this happiness ? All her life long she had hated to see things done in barren, unæsthetic fashion, and how, when her every dream was more than realized, could she break the spell ?

Yet nothing, she gayly declared, could be more reckless than such prodigality. Her father had been a plain farmer, her mother a French Canadian. Both were dead, and had left forty thousand dollars to be divided among ten children, and she had at need drawn her own share, until now she was well towards the end of her last thousand. After that was spent, the deluge ! she proclaimed with a laugh, which nevertheless covered a sigh. She had lived as economically as she could ; now and then, when her remittances had been delayed, she had suffered dire straits of poverty. Of course at times she was disheartened and homesick, and went to bed ready to cry her eyes out; but a new day was certain to find her with restored courage, ready to “ work the mine of her youth to the last vein of its ore.” She had lived five years in Italy, and was content.

Such frankness put to shame reserve on Keith’s part. He told her he had been through his course at Harvard, and afterwards had had a few terms at Oxford; that the preceding year his mother, who was a widow and lived in Philadelphia, had joined him in England, and that after a summer in Switzerland and Germany they had gone to Greece, Egypt, and the Holy Land. On their return to Italy, in April, they had been joined by some friends and cousins, one of whom had fallen ill at Siena. This had detained the rest of the party, Keith explained, while he kept his eyes fixed on the cypresses slowly vibrating against the sky, and the acacias shimmering in the breeze.

“ I came to Florence,” he went on to say, “ to wait for my mother. I like Florence. One comfort about it is that one is not called upon to care a button about its history. Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem make such a pull upon one. Not to have more or less of a clear idea as to what happened there is to miss our most precious privileges, for we are — we can’t help being — Romans and Greeks, not to say Christians, almost more than we are Americans. Not even our individual happenings are as real as what happened in those places. But the Guelphs and Ghibellines are no more to me than the Kilkenny cats. I suppose they enjoyed their endless squabblings. I am sorry, it is true, that they made Dante uncomfortable, just as I am bored with the Medici for the sake of Michael Angelo.”

Of course Keith was talking for the sake of talking, and to hide the fact that he was not wholly frank. He did not say what passionate joy in living he had felt at Amalfi, Sorrento, and Rome until he had made that foolish confession to Rose Bellew. But how can a young man be candid about such things ? Besides, he was beginning to admire Miss Phillimore, and was ready to be absorbed by her. She was so pretty, and over and beyond her prettiness had a world of ways full of a subtle yet simple witchery. He admired even her eccentricities, her audacities. After they had finished their luncheon he asked permission to smoke a cigarette.

“ And you are not going to offer me one ? ” she demanded, with open-eyed amazement.

Why not ? He reopened his case, and she accepted an Egyptian and lighted it with an air of enjoyment. Honestly, he did not consider that smoking enhanced the value of a pair of sweet lips ; still, niceties of taste hinge on habit, and no doubt this little rounding off into sheer human weakness gave an added touch of piquancy to a girl who frankly set out to be nothing if not piquant. After all, was not what a man needed in a woman a sure feeling of camaraderie? And how can a woman be a man’s real companion when she is separated from him by opposite standards, and looks down upon his failings from her icy pinnacle of superior virtue ? Ought she not rather to meet him halfway, and give him a grain of encouragement, making him feel that his little vices do not wholly cut him off from grace ? There are girls — Rose Bellew, for example — who demand better bread than can be made of wheat.

While Keith revolved these ethical questions in his mind, Miss Phillimore, as she smoked her cigarette, entertained him with historiettes of her life in the different art-centres where she had studied. At first she had had dreams of success. In Paris she had twice gained a medal, and had believed that presently her apprenticeship would be over. Alas ! Art to her was to be an endless apprenticeship. Pang by pang the merciless truth had bitten into her that her initiation would never be complete ; that she was one of the hundreds, the thousands, of those who never reach the promised land. Besides the artistic defeat, she had to suffer a commonplace disappointment. Success would have vindicated her to her nine warning brothers and sisters at home who had deplored her erratic course.

“ But I would not give up my five years for the whole forty thousand dollars.” she declared. “ Art has widened my world, and now I could be happy anywhere, after a fashion, for I have seen into the heart of things. How restless I used to be at home! Did you never feel, Mr. Tresillian, when you were leading a humdrum life, that you must break out of it, or become frantic ? ”

“ I never lead a humdrum life, if I can help it,” Keith replied.

“ No ; if men do not like what they are doing, they can go and do something else,” said Phillis. “ But honestly, Mr. Keith Tresillian, when I first saw you yesterdayyou looked inexpressibly bored. In fact, it was that weary little frown between your brows which made me feel as if it might be a mercy to give you a bit of amusement.”

“ Then you confess you did make the first advances ! ”

“ I shall confess nothing of the sort. Yet why should I not ? It is not Christian, it is not human, to be indifferent to one’s fellow-creatures. Besides, everybody I know in Florence has gone away, and I was lonely, and, looking at your innocent face and reflecting that you too were melancholy, I perceived that it might be a good deed to pretend to lose my color-box.”

Keith made a wry face over the word “ innocent,” but when she pursued, “ What is the use of being stiff and stupid, and letting pleasant opportunities go by? ” he replied, “ No use in the world.”

Indeed, he felt that to miss this opportunity would be a sheer loss of valuable experience, for Phillis gave him sensations ; often, in fact, two sensations at once. She seemed absolutely unconscious of anything unusual in this sudden friendship. Could anybody so bright be so unconscious? Was this facility a part of the girl’s passionate hunger for life and for art, or did it come from a desire to dazzle, if not by cleverness and charm, at least by novelty ?

For the next fortnight Keith rarely saw Mr. Mortimer Mayo except late at night. Of course that gentleman, who invariably made a point of establishing a complete census of Americans in any European city where he spent two days, knew all about Miss Phillimore and the dance she was leading the young man. In fact, he had seen the charming copyist not only in Florence, but in Paris and in Munich, and he was ready to offer warnings to Keith, who, however, looked so much surprised and put on so haughty an air at the first suggestion of advice that his Mentor thought best to defer it until it should be required.

Meanwhile, Miss Phillimore’s single aim seemed to be to work as hard as possible herself, and at the same time to give Keith a vivid and personal experience of Florentine life. What he had hitherto done for the sake of seeing and doing it she tried to make him feel in an original, vital, and fruitful way. Certainly Keith enjoyed his companion’s explanation of whatever touched her fancy or feeling more than the most learned of guidebooks, and at this period no doubt assimilated a great many ideas, artistic and otherwise. She had a passionate appreciation of Michael Angelo’s Night, the sadness of which Keith felt would not have been so unutterably hopeless if the Morning had but been happier. She liked to interpret Fra Angelico’s frescoes at San Marco, each opening its separate dazzling vista into the joys of heaven and the communion of saints to the inmate of the little cell. She rejoiced in the Giottos, the Cimabues, the Botticellis. She loved all art, indeed, from its first germ to its perfected blossom, its great themes and its fragments in little heterogeneous bits picked up here and there. She delighted in the inspired tenderness of the old masters for children, and had once painted nothing but children for six months, beginning with Raphael’s Cherub in fresco and Van Dyck’s baby in the Roman Accademia. However she might paint, she could easily enough embody her conception in words.

Visits to churches and galleries were reserved for the dull days. Usually the weather bade artists be out among the hills, drinking in the marvels of the summer light. Their custom was to meet early at some appointed rendezvous (Keith did not even know where Phillis lodged), and then, issuing from the city by one of the gates, to climb, perhaps on foot, perhaps in a peasant’s donkey-cart, to some point of vantage for the artist; for Phillis’s desire was to paint everything. “ Studies ” she called her attempts to pluck the heart out of the mystery of the glowing summer pageant; but even the word “studies” suggests work more finished than these flingings, as it were, of her paint-pot at her canvas. There were “studies” in blues, beginning with the purplish opaque tints at the bases of the mountains, melting insensibly into the lapis lazuli of the slopes, and shading off into sapphire shot with iridescent gleams where the ridges met the veil of warm light and luminous haze. Then the varying effects of green were to be seized: the emerald of watered meadows ; the yellow of willows and acacias; the shimmering argent of poplars ; the aquamarine of waving grain ; the rich tint of figs and vines already running riot in bacchanal profusion ; the glaucous hues, from verd antique to silver, of the gnarled and twisted olives with their hundred arms ; the blackness of the tapering cypresses guarding the approaches to belvederes and campanile towers.

“ But it is only Corot who can make his trees sway in the wind,” Phillis would say, confessing her failure, yet not, even in the moment of defeat, letting go the passion and illusion of her art.

Sometimes they gained admittance to the grounds of a deserted villa, with terraces where there were rows of pomegranates set with their scarlet stars, and oleanders whose sprays of rosy bloom showed ‘against the pule blue sky. She liked to paint the formal garden walks set between carefully pruned hedges, with statues beckoning from niches of laurel, ilex, and cypress, beds of lilies of the Annunciation, pinks in profusion, and larkspurs of all colors.

Whether or no she succeeded in nature’s trick of forcing inharmonious tints into joyous agreement, she executed her task with an ease, a rapidity of movement, an expression of personality, a dramatic vehemence, which might well have been the prerogative of genius, but in her case was probably only an indication of her passion for anything hitherto unguessed, unfelt, unseized. The superhuman industry of the girl, her greed, almost, for some new effect of light, shadow, or color, made Keith sometimes cry out, —

“ But it down ! You have worked long enough.”

“ I must make my hay while the sun shines. I shall probably do very little painting after I go back to Ohio.”

“ You will never go back to Ohio,” Keith said once, with sudden decision.

“ What else am I to do ? ” she asked naively. “ I can live on twenty francs a week, if necessary, but I must have my twenty francs; and where are they to come from when I have spent my last hundred dollars ? ”

This practical question, put with a droll but appealing glance, tugged at Keith’s sensibilities.

“ You have brothers and sisters,” he suggested.

“ They are not too well off themselves, and ever since I came to Europe they have been holding up the fact to me that my last condition would be worse than my first. I shall ask nothing of them.”

“ Some women earn their own living,” said Keith, “ but ” —

“ Thank you. I could n’t make my own living, and I would n’t if I could; that is, unless people would buy my pictures. What a big brutal world it is! Don’t you suppose that at times I feel sick of life ? ”

In spite of this seeming candor, there lurked, to Keith’s perceptions, a shade of mystery in the girl’s position. It seemed to him utterly incredible that she was actually dancing giddily on the edge of a financial precipice, — she was too light of heart; and she was too candidly happy and interested in her work to be a possible adventuress. For although she seemed to challenge his sympathy by these speeches, made with a coquettish sidelong glance, he was almost certain that she regarded him from a purely disinterested standpoint. Had he believed that he had in any way touched her heart, he could not have refrained at such times from putting out his hand and clasping hers, but something warned him off. Soft as she was in glance and tone, he suspected that she was experimenting with him ; trying, solely out of mischief, to make him fall in love with her. Yet, if he gave a sign of feeling, she seemed almost cynically to run away from the suggestion that either he or she was capable of sentiment. He had never shaken hands with her. He would almost have expected a metamorphosis if he had touched her. Her queer little frocks, her pointed shoes, her long, wrinkled gloves, were all instinct with her personality. He would have apologized if one of her bits of ribbon had blown against him. And although he said each day that he was amusing himself, humoring her to the top of her bent simply to see what she would do or say next, she was actually a pathetic little figure to him. Her talk of poverty, her little economies, made him ache. Her declaration that she was almost at the end of things, and after that expected the deluge, stirred a pity not far from deep tenderness. She had done so much with that meagre patrimony of hers, whose whole was less than his own allowance, which he might exceed at will. He speculated on the amount possibly spent by Miss Bellew upon her gowns alone. Sometimes, when conversation led him into allusions to his habits, opportunities, and expectations, he observed an abstractedness of look on Phillis’s face which suggested mental calculations.

“ You must be enormously rich,” she said once.

He told her that the uncle whose name he bore had left him money, but that otherwise he was dependent on his mother, as his father’s estate would not he divided until after her death, which Heaven avert for a century to come !

“ I shall settle down in October with my father’s brother, Judge Tresillian, and dig away at the law,” Keith observed.

“ I should say you were very well off with what you have inherited already,” she returned.

“ You live like a bird on a bough. You don’t consider what it costs to keep up a house.”

“ Oh, you are thinking of marrying somebody. Suppose,” she pursued, with the large-eyed simplicity of an inquisitive child, “that you were to marry: what would happen then ? ”

“ If I married in a way to suit my mother, she would no doubt give me a hundred or two thousand, as she did each of my three brothers. They are all married.”

“ A hundred or two thousand francs ? ”

“ No, dollars.”

“ A hundred or two thousand dollars! I cannot believe that I am acquainted with anybody who can even talk about so much money.”

“ It would be little enough to live on, for a married man, unless his wife were well enough off to buy her own gowns.”

“ If I were to marry a man with a hundred thousand dollars,” observed Phillis, “ I should insist on having gowns from Worth, bonnets from Louise, diamonds, laces, six-button, twenty-button gloves by the dozen pairs, all the bonbons I could eat, a carriage to drive about in, with coachman and footman, a maid to do my hair, and a large black poodle for her to lead about. In such an ideal existence I should need some cross to bear, and I have often reflected that one of the worst trials in life would be to own one of those creatures, they look so wretched, so imbecile, so unlike a real dog.”

“ All I can say is,” replied Keith, with sudden energy, “ that unless your husband had some remunerative occupation you would soon be at the end of his bank account. It is clear you have not the most rudimentary ideas of how much money people require for such extravagant outlays as you are ambitious for.’’

“ I fancy,” Phillis proceeded, evidently enamored of the picture she had drawn of herself, with a maid leading about a black poodle, shaven and trimmed by an artist, “that I might greatly enjoy being a rich man’s wife. Do you think I should become the position ? ”

“ On the contrary, I consider that you would be thrown away on a rich fellow who can have yachts and horses,” Keith retorted. “ A man of about my means might appreciate you.”

“ But I consider you a rich man.”

“ I might afford to hire a villa near Fiesole. I am told you can get one furnished, with twenty rooms, for five hundred francs a year, with terraces, lemon and citron trees, olives, figs, and roses thrown in ; to say nothing of a garden which is tilled by some worthy person who bestows on you half the produce. It really seems to me a man might be very happy living there, with a charming wife to walk on the terraces with, and look down on the city and across at the Carrara Mountains.”

“ Could you be contented with so little ? ” she demanded, looking at him, her head a little on one side, with roguish eyes and lips apart, smiling.

His inclination was to kiss her, if only to punish her for being so pretty and so provoking; but that lurking fun in her eyes, suggesting that she was experimenting on his nerve, restrained him.

“ It would be anything but tame the first year,” he returned, also laughing. “ Perhaps in time, unless she were very amusing ” —

“ That is the crucial test! ” she cried. “Nothing could induce me to marry a man who expected me to amuse him, who waited to see what I would do next. I shall insist on my husband’s being a serious personage. He must keep me in order, permit no vagaries; he will put an end to my cigarette - smoking ! He will, I dare say, enjoy nothing so much as having family prayers and reading sermons aloud to me, and will insist on my darning his stockings and making myself useful generally.”

“ Alas ! ” cried Keith, with a gesture of despair. “ I am not that man.”

Such conversations were apt to take place over their meals, which varied less according to appetite than opportunity. Sometimes, when they had followed the white roads too far, they could find little or nothing to eat save cherries and apricots, which they bargained for with the peasant girls and boys who were picking the luscious fruit for the next morning’s market. Again, they found some wayside trattoria, where they ordered Italian dishes : kid cutlets fried in batter ; an omelet stuffed with green peas; brown-gravied macaroni; salads in which every vegetable, known and unknown, was pressed into service; and Gorgonzola cheese. Charm was rarely lacking at these meals, even if the cookery was not invariably of the best. They were offered such a smiling welcome ; the little table was set out with fresh linen ; in the centre was placed the high copper or silver - plated stand into which was tossed the large never-failing fiasco of Chianti in its wicker case ; and the signor’s orders were awaited with such an air of eager deference. Phillis never betrayed a flicker of consciousness that her relation to the young man excited curiosity or elicited conjecture; not even when a bland, smiling Tuscan placed a chair for the signor at the head, and one for the signora at the foot, of the board, adding, with a glow of satisfaction, —

“ Saranno come in casa loro.”

The blood mounted to Keith’s face, but Phillis only laughed, and said, —

“ Actually it gives me a feeling of the domestic.”

Keith was fully alive to the piquancy of the situation, but dismissed its consequences, telling himself that society and social conventions were too far off to spoil the pleasure of these long summer days. He knew by this time that Phillis’s ignorance, innocence, and modesty were of the antique sort. The confidence she reposed in him would have been incredible if she had given it to any one else, but since he was her companion what did it matter ? No one was otherwise than admiringly respectful. They both looked so young, they showed such a knack of absorbing the pleasantness of a situation, that they disarmed criticism.

Ellen Olney Kirk.