Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/441

 she really did play the piano very brilliantly. But still she had to make her living somehow! One could be reasonably sure with her good looks that she was counting on using the concert platform, if indeed she got to it, as an angling station from which to fish for wealthy eligibles. Crittenden needn't fool himself that she would ever look at him, with that ridiculous little inheritance he had played up so, on his arrival in Rome!

Not that Crittenden seemed to be trying to make an impression! Quite the contrary. Was there anybody who, more than that poor fellow, seemed possessed to put his worst foot foremost? If they hadn't been pitiable, Livingstone could have laughed at the breaks Crittenden constantly made, at the way he was everlastingly showing himself up as entirely an outsider to their world.

That evening, when they fell to talking of their favorite dishes, was a sample. As a parlor amusement they had been challenging each other to construct imaginary meals such as would be perfection if you could only get them together,—sole frite from the Ambassadeurs; roast duck with the inimitable sauce of Foyot's; Asti Spumanti, the real; Brie straight from the only farm in the Seine-et-Marne that made it right … all that sort of mouth-watering, exquisite imaginings. When Crittenden's turn came, had he risen to the occasion? Had he made the slightest effort to make a decent appearance? No, he had said, "Oh, count me out on this. I have a regular hired-man's appetite, and if it begins to fail, I go out and run a mile and then I can eat anything!"

Livingstone tried his best to cover up such breaks with hasty, tactful improvisations of talk, but he had noticed the amazed stare with which Miss Allen had received this partticular [sic] revelation of Crittenden's crudity.

Miss Mills had stared, too, or as near to it as she ever came, over in the Capitoline, when she had asked Crittenden if he happened to know anything about Constantius Chlorus, at whose ugly face they were just then looking. Crittenden had answered in that coarse, would-be comic jargon he occasionally affected, that he didn't remember reading a thing