Manners and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, American
The Henry D. Greggs arrived in Rome on the two o'clock train from
Naples. And all the Roman knights of the waving palm espied them from
afar and hailed them with whoops of joy. The season was still young and
the Henry D. Greggs looked like money--not Italian money, which is
reckoned in lire, but American money, which mounts grandly to dollars.
The postcard men in the Piazza delle Terme sped after their motor taxi.
The swarthy brigand, with his wooden box of tawdry souvenirs, marked
them as they rode past. The cripple who lurked behind a pillar in the
colonnade threw aside his coat with a practised hitch of his shoulder to
reveal the sickeningly maimed arm that was his stock in trade.
Mr. and Mrs. Henry D. Gregg had left their comfortable home in Batavia,
Illinois, with its sleeping porch, veranda and lawn, and seven-passenger
car; with its two glistening bathrooms, and its Oriental rugs, and its
laundry in the basement, and its Sunday fried chicken and ice cream,
because they felt that Miss Eleanora Gregg ought to have the benefit of
foreign travel. Miss Eleanora Gregg thought so too: in fact, she had
thought so first.
Her name was Eleanora, but her parents called her Tweetie, which really
did not sound so bad as it might if Tweetie had been one whit less
pretty. Tweetie was so amazingly, Americanly pretty that she could have
triumphed over a pet name twice as absurd.
The Greggs came to Rome, as has been stated, at two P.M. Wednesday. By
two P.M. Thursday Tweetie had bought a pair of long, dangling earrings,
a costume with a Roman striped collar and sash, and had learned to loll
back in her cab in imitation of the dashing, black-eyed, sallow women
she had seen driving on the Pincio. By Thursday evening she was teasing
Papa Gregg for a spray of white aigrets, such as those same languorous
ladies wore in feathery mists atop their hats.
"But, Tweet," argued Papa Gregg, "what's the use? You can't take them
back with you. Custom-house regulations forbid it."
The rather faded but smartly dressed Mrs. Gregg asserted herself:
"They're barbarous! We had moving pictures at the club showing how
they're torn from the mother birds. No daughter of mine--"
"I don't care!" retorted Tweetie. "They're perfectly stunning; and I'm
going to have them."
And she had them--not that the aigret incident is important; but it may
serve to place the Greggs in their respective niches.
At eleven o'clock Friday morning Mary Gowd called at the Gregg's hotel,
according to appointment. In far-away Batavia, Illinois, Mrs. Gregg had
heard of Mary Gowd. And Mary Gowd, with her knowledge of everything
Roman--from the Forum to the best place at which to buy pearls--was to
be the staff on which the Greggs were to lean.
"My husband," said Mrs. Gregg; "my daughter Twee--er--Eleanora. We've
heard such wonderful things of you from my dear friend Mrs. Melville
Peters, of Batavia."
"Ah, yes!" exclaimed Mary Gowd. "A most charming person, Mrs. Peters."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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