"Effie, take Mr. Colville's hat," said her mother. "We're going to make you stay to lunch," she explained to him. "Is that so?" he asked, with an effect of polite curiosity. "Yes." Imogene softly clapped her hands, unseen by Mrs. Bowen, for Colville's instruction that all was going well. If it delights women to pet an undangerous friend of our sex, to use him like one of themselves, there are no words to paint the soft and flattered content with which his spirit purrs under their caresses. "You must have nearly finished the history," added Mrs. Bowen. "Well, I could have finished it," said Colville, "if I had only begun it. You see, writing a short history of the Florentine people is such quick work that you have to be careful how you actually put pen to paper, or you're through with it before you've had any fun out of it." "I think Effie will like to read that kind of history," said her mother. The child hung her head, and would not look at Colville; she was still shy with him; his absence must have seemed longer to a child, of course. At lunch they talked of the Carnival sights that had begun to appear. He told of his call upon Mr. Waters, and of the old minister's purpose to see all he could of the Carnival in order to judge intelligently of Savonarola's opposition to it. "Mr. Waters is a very good man," said Mrs. Bowen, with the air of not meaning to approve him quite, nor yet to let any notion of his be made fun of in her presence. "But for my part I wish there were not going to be any Carnival; the city will be in such an uproar for the next two weeks." "O Mrs. Bowen!" cried Imogene reproachfully; Effie looked at her mother in apparent anxiety lest she should be meaning to put forth an unquestionable power and stop the Carnival. "The last Carnival, I thought there was never going to be any end to it; I was so glad when Lent came." "Glad when _Lent_ came!" breathed Imogene, in astonishment; but she ventured upon nothing more insubordinate, and Colville admired to see this spirited girl as subject to Mrs. Bowen as her own child. There is no reason why one woman should establish another woman over her, but nearly all women do it in one sort or another, from love of a voluntary submission, or from a fear of their own ignorance, if they are younger and more inexperienced than their lieges. Neither the one passion nor the other seems to reduce them to a like passivity as regards their husbands. They must apparently have a fetish of their own sex. Colville could see that Imogene obeyed Mrs. Bowen not only as a _protegee_ but as a devotee. "Oh, I suppose _you_ will have to go through it all," said Mrs. Bowen, in reward of the girl's acquiescence. "You're rather out of the way of it up here," said Colville. "You had better let me go about with the young ladies--if you can trust them to the care of an old fellow like me."