Page:Dorothy Canfield - Rough-hewn.djvu/443

 There was, however, one advantage about the expedition to the Sistine Chapel. They were always so fearfully tired afterwards that they took a cab back to the Piazza Venezia and had ices together at a café. It was the first time since he had lived in Europe that Livingstone had been able to walk into a café with a handsome woman and watch the other men stare. That was a European manœuver which he had not somehow been able to accomplish, a tailor-suited, low-heeled, sailor-hatted American girl-tourist with her Baedecker in her ungloved hand, being by no means a figure to make other men stare. Of course it was perfectly evident that Miss Mills and Miss Allen were only nice girls (he hoped it was not too apparent that they were only Americans), but they were handsome and Miss Mills was always stunningly dressed. It was next best to what Livingstone had always secretly longed to do, as, eating his frugal demi-glace, he had watched a medaled Italian officer or monocled, heavy-eyed man-about-town sitting opposite a conspicuous woman-de-luxe with high-heeled slippers, a provocative gown, and a huge hat shading her black-rimmed, roving eyes, the only movable feature of her spectacular face, painted and powdered to a hierarchic immobility.

That was the life! That was what Livingstone would love to do! Thus to afficher yourself with a really bad woman, how deliciously un-American and cosmopolitan! On the other hand, those women were said to be very expensive and hard to handle, rapacious, without the slightest scruple as to how they emptied your pockets. Livingstone was in mortal terror of letting one of them get any hold on him and his tiny resources. He knew he would be no match for her. And anyhow all he wanted of one was to sit, jeweled and painted and conspicuously non-respectable, across a table from him at a café, so that other men would look at him as he now looked at other men. He often wished he could hire one just to do that.

However, in the meantime, it was a very pleasant pastime (and might, by George, lead to something, who knew!) to sit across the table from two merely nice but really very