s off."

It was later when Savilla had been kept at home by a slight
indisposition from a shower that caught them unprepared, she expressed
her doubt of a winter in Italy being anything more than a longer stick
with which to beat a dog.

"She will have spent all her money on it, and the snow will be just as
deep in Bloombury next year. There isn't anything _really_ the matter
with her, but she's just too fine for it. It's like seeing a clumsy
person handlin' one of them spun glass things, the way I have to sit
still and see Providence dealing with Savilla Dassonville. It may be
sort of sacrilegious to say so, but I declare it gives me the fidgets."

It ought of course to have given Peter, seeing the interest he took in
her, a like uneasiness; but there was something in the unmitigated
hardness of her situation that afforded him the sort of easement he had,
inexplicably, in the plainness of her dress. His memory was not working
well enough yet for him to realize that it was relief from the strain of
the secondary feminity that had fluttered and allured in Eunice
Goodward.

It was even more unclearly that he recognized that it had been a strain.
All this time he had been forgetting her--and how completely he had
forgotten her this new faculty for comparison was proof--he had still
been enslaved by her appearance. It was an appearance, that of Eunice's,
which he admired still in the young American women at the expensive
hotels where he had put up, and admitted as the natural, the inevitable
sign of an inward preciousness. But if he allowed to himself that he
would never have spoken to Savilla Dassonville that day at San Marco, if
she had been to the eye anything that Eunice Goodward was, he told
himself it was because he was not sure from behind which of those
charming ambuscades the arrows of desolation might be shot. If he gave
himself up now to the play of the girl's live fancy he did so in the
security of her plainness, out of which no disturbing surprises might
come. And she left him, in respect to her hard conditions, without even
the excuse for an attitude. Eunice had been poor in her world, and had
carried it with just that admixture of bright frankness and proud
reserve which, in her world, supported such a situation with most charm.
She made as much use of her difficulties as a Spanish dancer of her
shawl; but Savilla Dassonville was just poor, and that was the end of
it. That he got on with her so well by th