Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/422

 entertainment which had uplifted him to exaltation. "You don't realize, Crittenden, what an opportunity that was to see exclusive Roman society, the kind that foreigners like us never meet, not the flashy, big-hotel, off-color crowd. Why, I was introduced to name after name that sounded like a page out of Roman history."

Neale thought with a passing grim irony that Livingstone's phrase was accurately turned—"introduced to names"—yea, verily. Well, names were what Livingstone was after.

"Oh, you up already, Miss Allen," said Livingstone, springing to seat her with an agility for which Neale hated him. He himself sat like a lump, incapable because of the sudden rush of blood to his head, of anything but nodding a silent answer to her greeting.

Livingstone needed no help in keeping up the conversation. He flowed on, delightedly passing in review every detail of the evening of which he had not missed a single one, apparently, from the way Donna Antonia's maid did her hair to the dandruff on the coat-collar of the old Visconti. "Of course I know he's a great musician and all that, but really if you will let your hair grow so long, you ought to have a pocket clothes-brush and use it, oughtn't you? Why don't you do it for him. Miss Allen? Every one says he is absolutely gone on you, that you could do anything with him!" He passed from this without transition to Miss Mills' toilette which had been, so it seemed, a veritable triumph.

"Yes, yes, wasn't it beautiful! Eugenia's clothes are simply wonderful." Miss Allen broke in to say enthusiastically, "She has the most never-failing taste."

"A never-failing pocket-book," corrected Livingstone. "You don't get far with mere taste dans ce bas monde."

Miss Allen finished her coffee, and, setting down her cup, remarked, "You two Americans seem to have made a most agreeable impression last evening. Donna Antonia called me back to say that Signor Ambrogi would be glad to see more of you. She wished me to ask you both if you couldn't come to have tea with her and with Signor Ambrogi this afternoon at five."