Her family, who numbered fourteen--with her father and mother, and Grandmother and Grandfather, and nine brothers and sisters--lived in a four room house out in the country past the Cascine, which is the Park in Florence where fashionable people and those who are trying very hard to become fashionable, drive each afternoon. I didn’t like it; it didn’t seem very foreign or Italian. But to go on with my story, an American--or most Americans--would have hesitated about inviting people to a wedding party in a four room house that was simply crammed with children, not to mention the sick hen and the sheep with a broken leg, but it didn’t bother Beata! No, sir, she meant to have a party, and she had it, and I thought her asking every one she wanted _fine_. She said, through Miss Julianna, who interpreted, “You know we are poor, but we have great love in our hearts for you, and would like to share what we have with you. And will you do us the great honor to come to my wedding, hear the mass that will follow, and then eat with us the grand dinner at the house of my dearly loved father?” Every one accepted, and on the morning of the fourteenth--which was the date Leslie had chosen for Beata’s wedding in honor of a certain Saint who swells the mails on this day each year--we all started out toward Beata’s home. Leslie, who was increasingly kind and thoughtful, had hired a big motor which would, with a little squeezing, hold us all; and into this piled Miss Julianna, Miss Meek (she wore the purple velvet with the green buttons again) Miss Bannister who had never set foot in a motor before and was pale from fear (her fright lasted about a block, and then she got so jazzy that we almost had to tell her not to rock the boat) Viola, with a wide black band around her arm (Leslie had suggested that to save Viola’s buying new black clothes) and Leslie, Mr. Hemmingway and myself. The riding out was great fun, for the day was fine, and Miss Meek and Miss Bannister and Mr. Hemmingway were having such a good time that we were all infected with it. Mr. Hemmingway talked _every_ second about the first time he had ever seen a motor, which was in Australia, he _thought_ in Sidney, although oddly enough he could, in retrospect, only see the corner where the motor stood; and, all corners being pretty much the same, it _might_ have been in Melbourne. And he thought it was in 1889, although it might have been in 1888--and so on! Miss Meek kept saying, “My _eye_, how _jolly_!” and Miss Bannister, who, as I said, lost all fear after a block of going, kept asking if the chauffeur couldn’t “speed it up a bit.” She admitted that she was “no end keen for going, don’t you know!” When we reached the little house, I was so glad that Beata had asked us, because we saw, through her doing so, a side of life that we hadn’t come across before.