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"They Anna Mantegazza and she went to the dressing room at the Guarinis', where, it seems, Anna discovered them sympathetically, of course." Gheta's sobbing slowly subsided under the marchesa's urgent plea that unrestrained emotion would only deepen her trouble. She did not appear at dinner; and afterward the marchese, his wife and Lavinia sat wrapped in a gloomy silence.
Occasionally she leaned forward, pressed upon Gheta's shoulder, for a hasty unsatisfactory glimpse. "You are crushing my sleeves!" Gheta finally and sharply complained. "Do go somewhere else. Anna and I want to talk without your young ears eternally about. When do you return to the convent?" Lavinia drew back. However, she didn't leave.
"Heavens!" her father exclaimed, waving her away. "Another feminine catastrophe! Go to your sister and mother. My head is in a whirl." Her mother, then, had returned. She went forward and was suddenly startled by hearing Gheta's voice rise in a wail of despairing misery. She hurried forward to her sister's room.
Her interest was so roused that Lavinia, once more forgetful of Gheta's sleeves, leaned over her sister's shoulder, and immediately distinguished the object of their curiosity.
It was a potency which she instinctively shrank from probing. For a moment she experienced, curiously enough, a gust of passionate resentment, followed by a quickly passing melancholy, a faint regret. Anna Mantegazza and the maid radiated with satisfaction at the result of their efforts. The former murmured a phrase that bore Gheta's name, but Lavinia caught nothing else.
Do you remember, we heard it at the Pergola in the winter?" "Do go over to her," Lavinia whispered. He rose heavily and went to Gheta's side, and Lavinia waited expectantly for Mochales to change too. The Spaniard shifted, but it was toward the piano, where he stood with the rosy reflection of his cigarette on a moody countenance.
She wanted desperately to add her praise to Anna Mantegazza's enthusiastic plaudits, Gheta's subtle smile; but only the utmost banalities occurred to her. They descended the stone steps and slowly mounted toward the house. Cesare Orsi resolutely dropped back beside Lavinia. "You are really superb!" he told her in his highly colored Neapolitan manner.
Now her hair annoyed her, swinging childishly about her waist, and she secured it in an instinctively effective coil on the top of her head. She decided to leave it there for dinner. Her mother was away for the night; and she knew that Gheta's sarcasm would only stir their father to a teasing mirth.
A maid was putting soft paper in the sleeves of Gheta's ball dress, and Lavinia, finding an unexpected reluctance to proceed with what she had come to say, watched the servant's deft care. "Mochales was here last night," Lavinia finally remarked abruptly "that is he stood on the street and serenaded you." Gheta put her cup down with a clatter. "How charming!" she exclaimed.
Her eyes while she was speaking were directed toward Anna Mantegazza and the resentment changed to hatred. The other shrugged her shoulders indifferently and moved toward the dining room, catching Lavinia's arm in her own. Mantegazza entered at the soup and was seated on Gheta's right; Cesare Orsi was on Anna's left; and Lavinia sat between the two men, with Mochales opposite.
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