“I can take you to some spots most tourists miss,” he promised, as we again started on and up. “That’ll be nice,” I said, but I never dreamed then how very nice it would be, nor of how much I was to enjoy those trips he planned, in spite of the fact that I learned a good deal in the process. “And I thank you,” I ended, and he said I was most welcome. Then the door at the head of the third flight opened, and I saw a pretty, plump little Italian woman whose hair rippled like the waves that follow in the immediate wake of a steamboat, and when she held out both of her hands to me, and said, “Buona sera, Signorina, well-_come_!” I felt very much at home, and I loved her right away. “Are you Miss Rotelli?” I asked. “Yes, Mees Rotelli,” she answered as she nodded like everything, and I introduced Mr. Wake, and he left me after a promise of looking around to see how I was in a day or so, and then I followed Miss Rotelli--I soon called her Miss Julianna--in, And _in_-- Well, I think that everybody _should_ travel. As Mr. Hemmingway, whom I met at dinner, says, it is _educational_. One has an idea, or at least I did, that houses all over the world are about the same. I expected little differences, but I didn’t expect stone floors, or Cupids painted on walls, or ceilings that took a field glass to see, or to see a plaster-of-Paris Madonna on the wall with a tall wrought-iron candlestick on the floor before it. . . . And I hadn’t expected to see a box full of sawdust with a broom in it, or that they had to clean house differently in Florence. . . . I didn’t know that there was so little water that they had to dampen sawdust and brush it around the rooms instead of mopping them up as we do. There are many, many differences, but those things, and Beata, struck into me at first. Beata, who had a rose in her hair, and whom I soon found was the cook and waitress, was sitting in the long corridor into which I had stepped. She rose as I came in and bobbed from the knees, as Elaine McDonald, who is the only girl in our town who ever went to boarding school, did the first year after she came home. “She ees Beata,” said Miss Rotelli, and Beata spoke. “She say _well-come_,” explained Miss Rotelli. “Tell her thank you, if you please,” I said. And then I heard, “Niente, Signorina Americana!” from Beata, who again sat down and went on knitting a bright red tie. “She make for her sweetheart,” said Miss Rotelli, and I didn’t feel very far from home at _that_ moment. . . . Roberta makes dozens of ties and always falters over presenting them, and says that _perhaps_, after she’s made a _few_ more, she can do better--which mother doesn’t think very nice, because it makes every poor silly she gives them to think he’s the first one to have a tie knit for him by Roberta. But Roberta is like that! It’s all unfair that she should be popular, but--she is!