"Why I didn't know they were for me!"
"They were for both of you. Why should I make a difference?"
Miss Tita reflected as if she might by thinking of a reason for that,
but she failed to produce one. Instead of this she asked abruptly,
"Why in the world do you want to know us?"
"I ought after all to make a difference," I replied.
"That question is your aunt's; it isn't yours. You wouldn't
ask it if you hadn't been put up to it."
"She didn't tell me to ask you," Miss Tita replied without confusion;
she was the oddest mixture of the shrinking and the direct.
"Well, she has often wondered about it herself and expressed
her wonder to you. She has insisted on it, so that she has
put the idea into your head that I am insufferably pushing.
Upon my word I think I have been very discreet.
And how completely your aunt must have lost every tradition
of sociability, to see anything out of the way in the idea
that respectable intelligent people, living as we do under
the same roof, should occasionally exchange a remark!
What could be more natural? We are of the same country,
and we have at least some of the same tastes, since, like you,
I am intensely fond of Venice."
My interlocutress appeared incapable of grasping more than one clause
in any proposition, and she declared quickly, eagerly, as if she were
answering my whole speech: "I am not in the least fond of Venice.
I should like to go far away!"
"Has she always kept you back so?" I went on, to show her that I
could be as irrelevant as herself.
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