Indian Summer | Page 6

the turn of her head, the management of her arm from
the elbow, the curve of her hand from wrist to finger-tips, the smile,
subdued, but sufficiently sweet, playing about her little mouth, which
was yet not too little, and the refined and indefinite perfume which
exhaled from the ensemble of her silks, her laces, and her gloves, like
an odorous version of that otherwise impalpable quality which women
call style. She had, with all her flexibility, a certain charming stiffness,

like the stiffness of a very tall feather.
"And have you been here a great while?" she asked, turning her head
slowly toward Colville, and looking at him with a little difficulty she
had in raising her eyelids; when she was younger the glance that shyly
stole from under the covert of their lashes was like a gleam of sunshine,
and it was still like a gleam of paler sunshine.
Colville, whose mood was very susceptible to the weather, brightened
in the ray. "I only arrived last night," he said, with a smile.
"How glad you must be to get back! Did you ever see Florence more
beautiful than it was this morning?"
"Not for years," said Colville, with another smile for her pretty
enthusiasm. "Not for seventeen years at the least calculation."
"Is it so many?" cried Mrs. Bowen, with lovely dismay. "Yes, it is," she
sighed, and she did not speak for an appreciable interval.
He knew that she was thinking of that old love affair of his, to which
she was privy in some degree, though he never could tell how much;
and when she spoke he perceived that she purposely avoided speaking
of a certain person, whom a woman of more tact or of less would have
insisted upon naming at once. "I never can believe in the lapse of time
when I get back to Italy; it always makes me feel as young as when I
left it last."
"I could imagine you'd never left it," said Colville.
Mrs. Bowen reflected a moment. "Is that a compliment?"
"I had an obscure intention of saying something fine; but I don't think
I've quite made it out," he owned.
Mrs. Bowen gave her small, sweet smile. "It was very nice of you to try.
But I haven't really been away for some time; I've taken a house in
Florence, and I've been here two years. Palazzo Pinti, Lung' Arno della

Zecca. You must come and see me. Thursdays from four till six."
"Thank you," said Colville.
"I'm afraid," said Mrs. Bowen, remotely preparing to offer her hand in
adieu, "that Effie and I broke in upon some very important cogitations
of yours." She shifted the silken burden off her arm a little, and the
child stirred from the correct pose she had been keeping, and smiled
politely.
"I don't think they deserve a real dictionary word like that," said
Colville. "I was simply mooning. If there was anything definite in my
mind, I was wishing that I was looking down on the Wabash in Dos
Vaches, instead of the Arno in Florence."
"Oh! And I supposed you must be indulging all sorts of historical
associations with the place. Effie and I have been walking through the
Via de' Bardi, where Romola lived, and I was bringing her back over
the Ponte Vecchio, so as to impress the origin of Florence on her
mind."
"Is that what makes Miss Effie hate it?" asked Colville, looking at the
child, whose youthful resemblance to her mother was in all things so
perfect that a fantastic question whether she could ever have had any
other parent swept through him. Certainly, if Mrs. Bowen were to
marry again, there was nothing in this child's looks to suggest the idea
of a predecessor to the second husband.
"Effie doesn't hate any sort of useful knowledge," said her mother half
jestingly. "She's just come to me from school at Vevay."
"Oh, then, I think she might," persisted Colville. "Don't you hate the
origin of Florence a little?" he asked of the child.
"I don't know enough about it," she answered, with a quick look of
question at her mother, and checking herself in a possibly indiscreet
smile.

"Ah, that accounts for it," said Colville, and he laughed. It amused him
to see the child referring even this point of propriety to her mother, and
his thoughts idled off to what Mrs. Bowen's own untrammelled
girlhood must have been in her Western city. For her daughter there
were to be no buggy rides, or concerts, or dances at the invitation of
young men; no picnics, free and unchaperoned as the casing air; no
sitting on the steps at dusk with callers who never dreamed of asking
for her mother; no lingering at the gate with her youthful