y considered passing fiacres. I read to him aloud from
"Romola," and momma bought him an English and Italian washing book that
he might keep a record of his _camicie_ and his _fazzoletti_--it would
be so interesting afterwards, she thought--while the Senator exerted
himself in the way of cheerful conversation, but it was very
discouraging. Even when we dined at the fashionable open air restaurant
in the Cascine, with no less a person than Ouida, in a fluff of grey
hair and black lace, at the next table, and the most distinguished
gambler of the Italian aristocracy presenting a narrow back to us from
the other side, he permitted poppa to compare the quality of the beef
fillets unfavourably with those of New York in silence, and drank his
Chianti with a lack-lustre eye.

Towards the end of the week, however, Dicky grew remorseful. "It's all
very well," he said to me privately, "for Mrs. Wick to say that she
could spend a lifetime in Florence, if the houses only had a few modern
conveniences. I daresay she could--and as for your poppa, he's as
patient as if this were a Washington hotel and he had a caucus every
night, but it's as plain as Dante's nose that the Senator's dead sick of
this city."

"Dicky," I said, "that is a reflection of your own state of mind. Poppa
is willing to take as much more Botticelli and Filippo Lippi as it may
be necessary to give him."

"Oh, I know he _would_" Dicky admitted, "but he isn't as young as he
was, and I should hate to feel I was imposing on him. Besides, I'm
beginning to conclude that they've skipped Florence."

So it came to pass that we departed for Venice next day, tarrying one
night at Bologna. We had cut a day off Bologna for Dicky's sake, but the
Senator could not be persuaded to sacrifice it altogether on account of
its well known manufacture, into the conditions of which he wished to
inquire. The shops, as we drove to the hotel, seemed to expose nothing
else for sale, but poppa said that, in spite of the local consumption,
it had certainly fallen off, and, as an official representative of one
of its great rivals in the west, he naturally felt a compunctious
interest in the state of the industry. The hotel had a little courtyard,
with an orange tree in the middle and palms in pots, and we came down
the wide marble stairs, past the statues on the landing, and the
paintings on the walls, to find dinner laid on round tables out there, I
remember. A note of momma's occurs here