PARTISAN REVIEW
marine architectural salon she spoke of opening in the depths of the
Grand Canal. Miss Grabbe's intelligence was flighty (she had once
forgotten to include the furnace in a winter house that so hugged the
idea of warmth that the bathtubs were done in buff), but her estimates
were sharp; no contractor or husband had ever padded a bill on her;
she always put on her glasses to add up a dinner check. Men,
it
was
true, had injured her, and movements had left he.r flat, but these
misadventures she had cheerfully added to her capital. An indefatiga–
ble Narcissa, she adapted herself spryly to comedy when she per–
ceived that the world was smiling; she was always the second to laugh
at a prat-fall of her spirit. Mr. Sciarappa, at worst, could only be
another banana-peel on the vaudeville stage of her history.
It
was
possible, of course, that he might bore her, thought the two friends,
reasoning from experience; this alone she would not forgive them, yet
Miss Grabbe's judgments of men were often strikingly lenient--she
had been unattached when they left her in Paris.
Besides, Mr. Sciarappa was looking quite presentable this even–
ing, even though he had not yet changed his suit. Bright, eager,
intensely polite, useful, informative, he seemed once more the figure
they had seen
in
the train corridor; some innocent, cavalier hope
that had died in those long Milan evenings had revived in him, as
the expectation of parting made the two friends recede from him a
little and become strangers once more. The letter of introduction
wrote itself out, somehow, more affectionately than the friends had
planned it. "Enclosed," it said, "please find Mr. Sciarappa, who has
been most helpful to us in Milan."
Signorina Grabbe was waiting alone with a gondola in the
orange-lampshade glow of a Canaletto sunset when their autobus
drew up, two days later, at the station. Against the Venetian pano–
rama of white domes and pink towers, Mr. Sciarappa was so
pronouncedly absent that it seemed an indelicacy to inquire after him.
The two friends, whom solitude and a consciousness of indiscretion
had worked up to a pitch of anxiety and melodramatic conjecture,
now felt slightly provoked that Miss Grabbe had not, in this short
interval, been married or murdered for her money. At the very least,
they had expected to be scolded for sending her that curious envoy,
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