for praise except for those characteristics of his art which he feels to be his strong ones. Mrs. Palmer gave Will that, and he liked the incense.
Florian had said at St. Valentin that Will needed change of air, change of scene, change of company. And at Innsbruck he got them. The pretty American, having found her poet, didn’t mean to let him slip again too soon from her clutches. With the pertinacity of her compatriots, she fastened herself at once upon the two young Englishmen. Not obtrusively, to be sure, not ungracefully, not awkwardly, not as a European woman might have done the same thing, but with that occidental frankness and oblivion of sex which makes up half the charm of the charming American. The very next morning, at the early breakfast, she happened to occupy a small table close by them. They chatted together through the meal; at the end of it Will mentioned, in a casual sort of way that he was going down the street to the shop where Mrs. Palmer had bought the coral necklet. The dainty young widow seized her cue. “I am going down that way myself,” she said. “Let me come and show you. I won’t take a minute to run up for my hat. I’m not one of those women who can never go out for a morning stroll without spending half-an-hour before their mirrors, tittivating.” And, in spite of Will’s assurance that he could find the shop very well by himself, she was as good as her word, and insisted on accompanying them.
She had been charming in evening dress; she was more charming still in her girlish straw hat and neat tailor-made costume, as she tripped lightly downstairs to them. Florian, by her side, while they walked through the streets, cast sheep’s eyes askance up at her. Even Will, more mindful of poor Linnet’s desertion, was not wholly insensible to that taking smile, those pearly white teeth, that dainty small nose, those rounded contours. They turned down the road in the direction of the Maria-Theresien Strasse. Will knew of old that quaintest and most picturesque of European High Streets, with its queer gabled roofs, its rococo façades, its mediæval towers, its arcades and pillars. But to Florian, it all came with the added charm of novelty. Twice or thrice on their way, the spirit moved him to stop and perorate. Each time, the pretty widow cut him short at once with some quick retort of truly American practicality. At the shop, Will selected a second necklet, exactly like the one Mrs. Palmer had chosen. “I gave her nothing before I came away,” he said, turning to Florian, and only indicating by that very indefinite pronoun, the intended recipient of his beautiful gift. “One couldn’t give her money. ’Twould have been a positive insult. But this ought to look well on that smooth brown neck of hers.”
“For your sister, of course,” Mrs. Palmer said, pointedly.
“No; not for my sister,” Will admitted, with a quiet smile. “For a girl at the inn we’ve just left at St. Valentin.”
Mrs. Palmer said “Oh!” ’Twas an American oh. It deprecated the fact—and closed the episode. Cosmopolitan though she was, it surprised her not a little that Will should allude to such persons in a lady’s company. But there! these poets, you know—so many things must be condoned to them. Because they have loved much, much must be forgiven them. They have licence to break hearts and the most brittle of the commandments, with far less chance of blame than their even Christians.
Will’s transaction completed, Mrs. Palmer proceeded to buy a second similar set on her own account, for presentation to the second of the giggling inarticulates. “Poor girl!” she said, good-humouredly, “she looked so envious last night when I gave the other to Eva Powell, I couldn’t bear to think I’d left her out in the cold. Thirty florins, I think you said? Ah, yes; that’s twelve dollars. Not much to make a poor little girl so happy!”
From this, and various other circumstances which occurred in the course of their first few days at Innsbruck, it began to dawn dimly upon Florian’s open mind that their American friend, though she knew not the Van Rensselaers, the Vanderbilts, and the Livingstones, must have been “comfortably left” by the late Mr. Palmer. It was clear she had money for every whim and fancy. She took frequent drives, up the Brenner or down the Innthal, in a roomy two-horse carriage specially ordered from the livery stables; and she always gave a seat to one at least of the giggling inarticulates; and then, “on the girl’s account, you know,” with good-natured zeal, asked Will and Florian to take part in the expedition. “It’s so good for them, of course,” she said, “to see a little, when they can, of young men’s society. They’re each of them here with an invalid mamma—throat and lungs, poor things—you know the kind of person; and before I came, they had nobody to talk to, not even one another, for they were far too much afraid of a mutual snub ever to utter a syllable. I’ve tried to bring them out a bit, and make life worth living for them. But without a young man—at that age—no amusement’s worth anything. Do come, Mr. Deverill—there’s a good soul, just to humour them.”
And Will and Florian, it must be candidly allowed, fell in with a good grace with her philanthropic projects. Though, to be sure, when once the carriage got under way, they seemed much more desirous of amusing the pretty American herself, than of seconding her schemes for drawing out the latent conversational powers of the giggling inarticulates, who contented themselves chiefly with leaning back in their seats, and listening open-mouthed to Florian’s flamboyant disquisitions. That, however, is a detail. Will attempted at first to pay his share of the carriage; but such interference with her plans Mrs. Palmer most manfully and successfully resisted. She wanted to give the girls a little outing, she said; Will might come or he might stop; but she wasn’t going to let any other person pay for her well-meant attention to her poor little protégées. To that point she stuck hard, through thick and thin. They must come as her guests if they came as anything.
From this, and sundry other events that came under his knowledge by occulter channels, Florian grew strengthened in his idea that the late Mr. Palmer, whoever he might have been, had at least “cut up well,” and, what was more to the point, had cut up entirely in his widow’s favour. Now this was business; for Florian, incurious as he was by nature where mere gossip was concerned, liked to know what was what in the matrimonial market. As he was wont to put it sweetly to his friends at the Savile, he wasn’t going to throw himself away on a woman for nothing. He had an income of his own, just sufficient to supply him with the bare necessaries of life—such as stalls at the opera and hansoms ad libitum; and, this being so, he had no intention of giving up that singular franchise which young men call “their liberty,” except in return for valuable consideration. But if good things were going, he liked at least to know of them; some day, perhaps, if some lady bribed him high enough, he might possibly consent to retire by her side into the Philistine gloom of wedded respectability.
So he pushed his inquiries hard into the Vision’s antecedents, wholly without effect, during the first few days of their stay at Innsbruck.
A few nights later, however, as they sat in the salon after a long day’s tramp to the summit of the Patscher Kopf, Florian found himself cast casually into conversation with an American old maid, belonging to the most virulent type and class of old maidhood—“of the cat-kind, catty,” he said afterwards to Will Deverill; one of those remarkable persons who have pervaded cosmopolitan hotels for years together, and are on intimate terms with the domestic skeletons in every cupboard. Miss Beard, as she was called, favoured Florian at full length with the histories and antecedents of the giggling inarticulates, their papas and mammas, and all their forebears; informing him with much gusto how one of them had paid ninepence in the pound to his creditors, and another had been cashiered from the navy for embezzlement. Then she proceeded in the same strain to demolish the unprepossessing gentleman of nonconformist exterior, who had been guilty, it seemed, of the social crime of retail business. Miss Beard was inclined, indeed, to believe he was nothing more than a retired chemist; but she wasn’t even sure—with hushed and bated breath—that it mightn’t be as bad as grocery and provisions. All these, and many other unimportant details, Florian’s soul endured, possessing itself in patience for many minutes together, in the fervent hope that at last this living encyclopædia of genealogical knowledge would come round to the character of the Vision of Beauty.
“And Mrs. Palmer, who sits opposite me,” he adventured gently after awhile, when Miss Beard reached a pause in her caustic comments; “she seems a nice little thing in her way, though,