Page:The Dial (Volume 76).djvu/169



HE last guests came in half-frozen. They were grumbling about the frost-nipped blossoms, the storm clouds, the blackness of the lake. It had snowed on Monte Baldo! Italy filled them all with bitterness.

"I thought the weather was always good here."

"Just be patient. At least we have a genuine German stove. Farther back in the country all culture simply comes to an end, and people get chilblains."

The old hunchback excused everything in the name of beauty. The three daughters, who, united here after travelling from various points of the compass, were already talking again, had run through the subject of their wrinkled mother, and were very loudly discussing concerts they had given, pictures they had exhibited. The mother of the two little girls would talk of nothing but them. The councillor's wife was lauding the night-life in Berlin. "My husband knows what's what," she kept repeating, without considering what embarrassment one could cause her by the simple question as to just what it was that he knew. The old hunchback could only insist that in Vienna also a good deal was doing at night.

"That is not so!" the councillor's wife exclaimed. The hunchback was so chagrined that he nearly wailed the words, "How can you tell me that!" But she asserted once more, "That is not so!"

The editor from Augsburg declared the column with the lion, on the beach before St Mark's, to be a really charming little work. And Claire and Ada observed how he showed his teeth when he said "little work."

Everything astonished them: the bad breeding of the councillor's wife; and all the rest. They were fifteen and sixteen years old, had never come down from their country estate before, and now they were holding their clear eyes up to the unfamiliar world; as large as mirrors. No one looked in for very long, seeming to find