"Are you looking for that short Florentine history for Mrs. Bowen's little girl?" asked Mr. Waters, inclining his head slightly for the reply. "She mentioned it to me." By day Colville remarked more distinctly that the old gentleman was short and slight, with a youthful eagerness in his face surviving on good terms with the grey locks that fell down his temples from under the brim of his soft felt hat. With the boyish sweetness of his looks blended a sort of appreciative shrewdness, which pointed his smiling lips slightly aslant in what seemed the expectation rather than the intention of humour. "Not exactly," said Colville, experiencing a difficulty in withholding the fact that in some sort he was just going to write a short Florentine history, and finding a certain pleasure in Mrs. Bowen's having remembered that he had taken an interest in Effie's reading. He had a sudden wish to tell Mr. Waters of his plan, but this was hardly the time or place. They now found themselves face to face with the librarian, and Mr. Waters made a gesture of waiving himself in Colville's favour. "No, no!" said the latter; "you had better ask. I am going to put this gentleman through rather an extended course of sprouts." The librarian smiled with the helplessness of a foreigner, who knows his interlocutor's English, but not the meaning of it. "Oh, I merely wanted to ask," said Mr. Waters, addressing the librarian, and explaining to Colville, "whether you had received that book on Savonarola yet. The German one." "I shall see," said the librarian, and he went upon a quest that kept him some minutes. "You're not thinking of taking Savonarola's life, I suppose?" suggested Colville. "Oh no. Villari's book has covered the whole ground for ever, it seems to me. It's a wonderful book. You've read it?" "Yes. It's a thing that makes you feel that, after all, the Italians have only to make a real effort in any direction, and they go ahead of everybody else. What biography of the last twenty years can compare with it?" "You're right, sir--you're right," cried the old man enthusiastically. "They're a gifted race, a people of genius." "I wish for their own sakes they'd give their minds a little to generalship," said Colville, pressed by the facts to hedge somewhat. "They did get so badly smashed in their last war, poor fellows."