ad to show for his
ministrations. There was a great digging of holes and carting about
of earth, and after a while I grew so impatient that I had thoughts of
sending for my bouquets to the nearest stand. But I reflected that the
ladies would see through the chinks of their shutters that they must
have been bought and might make up their minds from this that I was a
humbug. So I composed myself and finally, though the delay was long,
perceived some appearances of bloom. This encouraged me, and I waited
serenely enough till they multiplied. Meanwhile the real summer days
arrived and began to pass, and as I look back upon them they seem to me
almost the happiest of my life. I took more and more care to be in the
garden whenever it was not too hot. I had an arbor arranged and a
low table and an armchair put into it; and I carried out books and
portfolios (I had always some business of writing in hand), and worked
and waited and mused and hoped, while the golden hours elapsed and the
plants drank in the light and the inscrutable old palace turned pale and
then, as the day waned, began to flush in it and my papers rustled in
the wandering breeze of the Adriatic.

Considering how little satisfaction I got from it at first it is
remarkable that I should not have grown more tired of wondering what
mystic rites of ennui the Misses Bordereau celebrated in their darkened
rooms; whether this had always been the tenor of their life and how in
previous years they had escaped elbowing their neighbors. It was clear
that they must have had other habits and other circumstances; that they
must once have been young or at least middle-aged. There was no end
to the questions it was possible to ask about them and no end to
the answers it was not possible to frame. I had known many of my
country-people in Europe and was familiar with the strange ways they
were liable to take up there; but the Misses Bordereau formed altogether
a new type of the American absentee. Indeed it was plain that the
American name had ceased to have any application to them--I had seen
this in the ten minutes I spent in the old woman's room. You could
never have said whence they came, from the appearance of either of them;
wherever it was they had long ago dropped the local accent and fashion.
There was nothing in them that one recognized, and putting the question
of speech aside they might have been Norwegians or Spaniards. Miss
Bordereau, after all, had been in Europe