Miss Manisty, however--in despair of her nephew--was bent upon doing her own duty. She asked all the proper questions about the girl's journey, about the cousins at Florence, about her last letters from home. Miss Foster answered quickly, a little breathlessly, as though each question were an ordeal that had to be got through. And once or twice, in the course of the conversation, she looked again at Mrs. Burgoyne, more lingeringly each time. That lady wore a thin dress gleaming with jet. The long white arms showed under the transparent stuff. The slender neck and delicate bosom were bare,--too bare surely,--that was the trouble. To look at her filled the girl's shrinking Puritan sense with discomfort. But what small and graceful hands!--and how she used them!--how she turned her neck!--how delicious her voice was! It made the new-comer think of some sweet plashing stream in her own Vermont valleys. And then, every now and again, how subtle and startling was the change of look!--the gaiety passing in a moment, with the drooping of eye and mouth, into something sad and harsh, like a cloud dropping round a goddess. In her elegance and self-possession indeed, she seemed to the girl a kind of goddess--heathenishly divine, because of that mixture of unseemliness, but still divine. Several times Mrs. Burgoyne addressed her--with a gentle courtesy--and Miss Foster answered. She was shy, but not at all awkward or conscious. Her manner had the essential self-possession which is the birthright of the American woman. But it suggested reserve, and a curious absence of any young desire to make an effect. As for Mrs. Burgoyne, long before dinner was over, she had divined a great many things about the new-comer, and amongst them the girl's disapproval of herself. 'After all'--she thought--'if she only knew it, she is a beauty. What a trouble it must have been first to find, and then to make that dress!--Ill luck!--And her hair! Who on earth taught her to drag it back like that? If one could only loosen it, how beautiful it would be! What is it? Is it Puritanism? Has she been brought up to go to meetings and sit under a minister? Were her forbears married in drawing-rooms and under trees? The Fates were certainly frolicking when they brought her here! How am I to keep Edward in order?' And suddenly, with a little signalling of eye and brow, she too conveyed to Manisty, who was looking listlessly towards her, that he was behaving as badly as even she could have expected. He made a little face that only she saw, but he turned to Miss Foster and began to talk,--all the time adding to the mountain of crumbs beside him, and scarcely waiting to listen to the girl's answers. 'You came by Pisa?' 'Yes. Mrs. Lewinson found me an escort--' 'It was a mistake--' he said, hurrying his words like a schoolboy. 'You should have come by Perugia and Spoleto. Do you know Spello?' Miss Foster stared.