"Oh, Mr. Crittenden, I've been wanting to see you! To share a joke with you! Such a joke! That invitation to tea, you know. You see, _you_ were really the one Signor Ambrogi wants to see, you were the only one Donna Antonia spoke of. But I knew it would hurt Mr. Livingstone so, if he were left out. I made her understand that. So she said, 'Oh, well, if you insist, he can come too.' It's rather--don't you think it is?--rather a joke?" She began to laugh again. "Don't you see it, the scene when he walks in alone--the good Livingstone in his best clothes, so happy and so important, with his best brand of European conversation in the show-window--a comparison most likely of Caravaggio's theory of treating wall spaces with Correggio's. And what Ambrogi wants to discuss is American railroad terminal facilities! Ambrogi is a man of the people. He's made his own way up from the bottom. He has probably never heard of Correggio in his life. And doesn't see why he should," she finished with a peal of laughter. Neale laughed, but he did not find it as comic as she. "I'd no idea of all that," he said uncomfortably. "Perhaps I ought to have gone. It rather looks like putting poor old Livingstone in a hole." "Oh, no; oh, _no_," she reassured him. "They'll be good to him. They may look at each other once or twice. But nothing more. He'll never know. He _doesn't_, Mr. Livingstone--often he doesn't know." "Not much, that's a fact," agreed Neale, reflecting that he did not seem to either. She asked him suddenly, "But really why _didn't_ you accept?" "Do you want to know?" he asked warningly. "Yes, I really wonder." "Simplest reason in the world. I didn't like Donna Antonia Pierleoni very well. She seemed to me like a bad-tempered, stupid old lady, mightily full of her own importance. Why under the sun _should_ I go and have tea with such a person?" "Eh bien...!" she breathed out a long, soft ejaculation of surprise, looking at him very queerly. "You're thinking I'm very rude to say such a thing about a friend of yours," he said, hanging his head. "I'm thinking no such thing at all," she contradicted him. "I don't believe you could _imagine_ what I'm thinking." "You never said a truer thing," Neale admitted ruefully. "Well, I'll tell you," she said, "though it couldn't be interesting to anybody but me. I was thinking that I had never heard anybody before who spoke the truth right out about somebody who had wealth and position." "You mustn't blame me for it!" Neale excused himself. "I'm a regular outsider on all that sort of thing--you remember the Sioux Indian in the eighteenth century who was taken to see the court at Versailles? How he strolled around in his blanket and couldn't make out what all the bowing and scraping was about? Well, he and I are about on a level of blank ignorance of social distinctions."