THE CICERONE
but Mr. Sciarappa's arrival seemed barely to have disturbed Miss
Grabbe, who had been busy, so she said, with an inner experience.
"Your friend turned up," she remarked at last, in the tone of one who
acknowledges a package. "What on earth did you find to talk to
him
about?" The young man groaned. Miss Grabbe had put her
rich, plump, practiced finger on the flaw in Mr. Sciarappa as pro–
saically as
if
he had been a piece of yard-goods-was there nothing
more to
be
said of him? "We found him rather odd," the young man
murmured in half-apology. "Oh, my dear," said Miss Grabbe, raising
her dyed black eyebrows, "all the men you meet on the
wagons-Zits
are like that. You must go to the little
campos
and the
trattorias
to
meet the real Italians."
And as Miss Grabbe went on to talk, in the dipping, swaying
gondola, of the intense, insular experience she had found, blazing as
the native
grappa,
in the small, hot squares, the working-class restau–
rants and dirty churches of Venice, Mr. Sciarappa seemed indeed a
poor thing to have offered her, a gimcrack souvenir such as one might
have bought in a railway station. The young man blushed angrily
as he felt his own trip and that of the young lady shrink to fit inside
Mr. Sciarappa's nipped-in gabardine suit.
He
was only saved from
despair by a memory of Miss Grabbe, as he had last seen her in Paris,
alone, with her hunter's look, and three saucers under her vermouth
glass, at a table in a Left Bank cafe-"Isn't it divine?" she had called
out to him, "don't you love it, don't you hate
New
York?"
Compared to Miss Grabbe, he perceived, he himself and the
young lady would always appear to skim the surface of travel. They
were
tourists; Miss Grabbe was an explorer. Looking at the two ladies
as they sat facing him in the gondola, he saw that their costumes
perfectly expressed this difference: the young lady's large black hat,
long gloves, high-heeled shoes, and nylon stockings
were
a declara–
tion of nationality and a stubborn assertion of the pleasure-principle
(what a nuisance that hat had been as it scraped against his neck on
the autobus, on the train, in the Metro in Paris) ; Miss Grabbe's
snood and sandals, her bright glass-bead jewelry, her angora sweater,
and shoulder-strap leather handbag, all Italian .as the
merceria,
she
wore in the manner of a uniform that announced her mobility in
action and her support of the native products. Moreover, her brown
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