ach other, the
persons to whom they were respectively to be offered. At Borne one of
the first things she said to her husband after entering the Coliseum had
been: "I guess I will give the ivory work-box to Bessie and the Roman
pearls to Aunt Harriet!" She was always hanging over the travellers'
book at the hotel; she had it brought up to her, with a cup of
chocolate, as soon as she arrived. She searched its pages for the
magical name of New York, and she indulged in infinite conjecture as to
who the people were--the name was sometimes only a partial cue--who had
inscribed it there. What she most missed in Europe, and what she most
enjoyed, were the New Yorkers; when she met them she talked about the
people in their native city who had "moved" and the streets they had
moved to. "Oh, yes, the Drapers are going up town, to Twenty-fourth
Street, and the Vanderdeckens are going to be in Twenty-third Street,
right back of them. My uncle, Henry Piatt, thinks of building round
there." Mrs. Percival Theory was capable of repeating statements like
these thirty times over,--of lingering on them for hours. She talked
largely of herself, of her uncles and aunts, of her clothes--past,
present, and future. These articles, in especial, filled her horizon;
she considered them with a complacency which might have led you to
suppose that she had invented the custom of draping the human form. Her
main point of contact with Naples was the purchase of coral; and all the
while she was there the word "set"--she used it as if every one would
understand--fell with its little, flat, common sound upon the ears of
her sisters-in-law, who had no sets of anything. She cared little for
pictures and mountains; Alps and Apennines were not productive of
New Yorkers, and it was difficult to take an interest in Madonnas who
flourished at periods when, apparently, there were no fashions, or, at
any rate, no trimmings.

I speak here not only of the impression she made upon her husband's
anxious sisters, but of the judgment passed on her (he went so far
as that, though it was not obvious how it mattered to him) by Raymond
Benyon. And this brings me at a jump (I confess it's a very small one)
to the fact that he did, after all, go back to Posilippo. He stayed away
for nine days, and at the end of this time Percival Theory called upon
him, to thank him for the civility he had shown his kinswomen. He went
to this gentleman's hotel, to return his visit, and there