THE CICERONE
not anxious for change. Her money had made her insular; she was
used to a mercenary circle and had no idea that outside it lovers
showed affection, friends repaid kindness, and husbands did not ask
an allowance or bring their mistresses home to bed. So now she ac–
cepted Mr. Sciarappa's dubious presence without particular ques–
tion; it struck her as far less unnatural than the daily affection she
witnessed between the young man and the young lady. She domesti–
cated all the queerness of his being with them in Venice. "My dear,"
she remonstrated with the young man, "he simply wants to sell us
something," dissipating Sciarappa as succinctly as if he had been a
Fuller Brush man at the door. It irritated them slightly that she
would not see the problem of Sciarappa, and they did not guess that
now, when they had given up expecting it, she would grapple with
their problem more matter-of-factly than they. While the two friends
slept, through the night of the fiesta she and Mr. Sciarappa made
love; when he departed, in dressing-gown and slippers, she thanked
him "for a very pleasant evening."
Mr. Sciarappa, however, did not stay to cement the relationship.
He left Venice precipitately, as though retreating ahead of Miss
Grabbe's revelations. He was gone the next afternoon, without spoken
adieux, leaving behind him a list of the second-best restaurants in Flor–
ence for the young lady, with an asterisk marking the ones where he
was personally known to the headwaiter. "Unhappily,"
his
note ran,
"one cannot be on a holiday forever." On a final zigzag of policy he
had careened away from them into the inexplicable. Now that he
had declared himself in action, his motives seemed the more obscure.
What, in fact, had he been up to? It was impossible to find out
from Miss Grabbe, for to her mind sex went without explanations;
it seemed to her perfectly ordinary that two strangers who were
indifferent to each other should spend the night locked in the privacies
of love.
Sitting up in bed, surrounded by hot-water bottles (for she had
caught cold in her stomach), she received the two friends at tea-time
and related her experiences of the night, using confession matter-of–
factly, as a species of feminine hygiene, to disinfect her spirit of any
lingering touch of the man. Scampi, she said, accepting the nickname
from the young man as a kind of garment for the Italian gentleman,
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