anything more
scintillating.

"A bad big school-girl, and I will have nothing more to do with you. If
you delight in being the talk of the town, all you have to do is allow
your friend Mr. Hunt in his spare hours to take you to see such things
as I have not yet had the honor of showing you."

"Blessed if I--Look here, you aren't mad in earnest? Sooner'n lose you,
I won't say another word. There! I've been Tchee-mah-boo-eh's Madonna
for the last time. Don't be cross with little T. T.--Talk of the Town!"

"If you had any discrimination, any reticence ..."

"No reticence? Does that mean can't keep anything to myself? You don't
know me!"

"You even tell your age."

"You aren't going to find fault with me for _that_?"

"Yes. At your age one should know better. It is part of your general and
too great frankness."

They upon occasions came near quarreling, but not seriously, her
disposition to quarrel was so small. Yet, two could not be outspoken and
one of them irritable, and those rocks never even be grazed.

She unwarily enlarged to him one day upon her disappointment in
Florence. By this time, she said, she was growing used to it, she didn't
notice so much the things she didn't like. But at first, with her
expectation high, her imagination inflamed by the Judge's and Antonia's
eloquence, the narrow streets, in some of them no sidewalks even, the
gloomy bars at the windows, the muddy river with the dirty old houses
huddled on the bank, the stuffy churches with the average height of the
Italian populace marked on the pillars by a dubious grindy brown tint,
the dreadful beggars, the black fingernails, the smells....

"Mrs. Hawthorne!" came from Gerald, who with difficulty had let her go
on thus far, "those were all you noticed, were they? In the most
wonderful city in the whole world, those are all you find to talk about!
The narrow streets, the beggars, the smells. Mrs. Hawthorne--" he nearly
trembled with the effort to keep calm, "this is obviously not the place
for you. You should have gone to ... to Switzerland! Instead of a
sunburned hill-side, with sober silver olives and solemn black
cypresses, and a pair of beautiful calm white oxen plowing, you would
have seen a nice grass-green pasture, at the foot of blinding peaks, cut
by an arsenic-green stream, on whose bank a red and white cow feeding!
Then among the habitations all would have been well-regulated, the
churches swept, perhaps even ventilated, the peo