Dorothy, and Other Italian StoriesWoolson, Constance Fenimore
General
Dorothy, and Other Italian Stories
Woolson, Constance Fenimore
Americans -- Italy -- Fiction; Italy -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, American
In the meantime Miss Harrison continued to like "the grandson of old
Adam," and again invited him to drive. A month went by, and, by the end
of it, he had seen in one way and another a good deal of these two
ladies. The "later manner" (as he mentally called it) of Miss Stowe
continued; when they were in company, she was as she had been
originally, but when they were unobserved, or by themselves, she gave
him the peculiar sober attention which he did not quite comprehend. He
had several theories about it, and varied between them. He was a man who
did not talk of persons, who never told much. If questioned, while
answering readily and apparently without reserve, it was noticed
afterwards that he had told nothing. He had never spoken of Sicily, for
instance, but had talked a good deal of Sweden. This reticence, so
exasperating to many women, seemed agreeable to Miss Stowe, who herself
did not tell much, or talk of persons--that is, generally. One person
she talked about, and with persistence. Morgan was hardly ever with her
that she did not, sooner or later, begin to talk to him about himself.
Sometimes he was responsive, sometimes not; but responsive or
unresponsive, in society or out of it, he had talked, all told, a goodly
number of hours with Miss Stowe when May attained its zenith and the
season waned.
The tourists had gone to Venice; the red gleam of guide-books along the
streets and the conscientiousness of woollen travelling-dresses in the
galleries were no longer visible. Miss Stowe now stepped over the
boundary-line of her caution a little; many of the people she knew had
gone; she went with Trafford to the Academy and the Pitti; she took him
into cool, dim churches, and questioned him concerning his creed; she
strolled with him through the monastery of San Marco, and asked what his
idea was of the next world. She said she liked cloisters; she would like
to walk in one for an hour or two every day.
He replied that there were a number of cloisters in Florence; they might
visit them in succession and pace around quietly. The effect would be
heightened if she would read aloud, as they paced, short sentences from
some ancient, stiff-covered little book like _De Contemptu Mundi_.
"Ah," she said, "you are not in earnest. But I am!"
And she seemed to be; he said to himself that he had hardly had a look
or word from her which was not only earnest, but almost portentously so.
She now began to do whatever he asked her to do, whether it was to sing
Italian music or to read Dante's _Vita Nuova_, both of which she had
said she did not like. It is probable that he asked her to do a number
of things about this time which he did not especially care for, simply
to see if she would comply; she always did.
"If she goes on in this sort of way," he thought, "never showing the
least opposition, or personal moods different from mine, I really don't
know where we shall end!"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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