Page:While Caroline Was Growing.djvu/345



"We take the Lockwood's Corners Clarion," she explained pacifically.

They addressed themselves to the meal, a strange trio. Caroline, usually a hopeless chatterbox, fell somehow and inevitably into the listener's seat. Their hostess could no longer be denied: her thirst gleamed in her eyes, and flesh and blood could not have withstood her plea for tidings of those distant, rosy lands whose laden wharves she could never see, nor ever glimpse their tiled roofs under foreign sunsets, their white spires beneath mysterious moons. Their clothes: was it true that the French wore wooden shoes? She had read that men in Italy walked in gay capes, colored like birds. Was there water in the streets, and were boats really their carriages? Did soldiers, red-coated, demand passports? Had her guest seen the snow tops of green slopes? Did dogs drag milk carts for white-capped women?

The girl, sulky at first, yielded finally, and in quick, nervous phrases poured out of her full budget. Taken from her convent school in California at fifteen, she had roamed the world