a sort of grievance I asked her why, since
she thought my garden nice, she had never thanked me in any way for the
flowers I had been sending up in such quantities for the previous three
weeks. I had not been discouraged--there had been, as she would have
observed, a daily armful; but I had been brought up in the common forms
and a word of recognition now and then would have touched me in the
right place.

"Why I didn't know they were for me!"

"They were for both of you. Why should I make a difference?"

Miss Tita reflected as if she might by thinking of a reason for that,
but she failed to produce one. Instead of this she asked abruptly, "Why
in the world do you want to know us?"

"I ought after all to make a difference," I replied. "That question is
your aunt's; it isn't yours. You wouldn't ask it if you hadn't been put
up to it."

"She didn't tell me to ask you," Miss Tita replied without confusion;
she was the oddest mixture of the shrinking and the direct.

"Well, she has often wondered about it herself and expressed her wonder
to you. She has insisted on it, so that she has put the idea into your
head that I am insufferably pushing. Upon my word I think I have
been very discreet. And how completely your aunt must have lost every
tradition of sociability, to see anything out of the way in the idea
that respectable intelligent people, living as we do under the same
roof, should occasionally exchange a remark! What could be more natural?
We are of the same country, and we have at least some of the same
tastes, since, like you, I am intensely fond of Venice."

My interlocutress appeared incapable of grasping more than one clause
in any proposition, and she declared quickly, eagerly, as if she were
answering my whole speech: "I am not in the least fond of Venice. I
should like to go far away!"

"Has she always kept you back so?" I went on, to show her that I could
be as irrelevant as herself.

"She told me to come out tonight; she has told me very often," said Miss
Tita. "It is I who wouldn't come. I don't like to leave her."

"Is she too weak, is she failing?" I demanded, with more emotion, I
think, than I intended to show. I judged this by the way her eyes rested
upon me in the darkness. It embarrassed me a little, and to turn
the matter off I continued genially: "Do let us sit down together
comfortably somewhere, and you will tell me all about her."

Miss Tita made no resistance to this. We found a be