George A. Birmingham

“ Mrs. Curtis is doing Europe to complete Bessie’s education. Pictures and statues, you know, and architecture and old furniture—just what a literary man wants in a wife.”
“I’m not really literary,” I said. “After all, guide-books don't appeal to the cultured minority.”
I do not know what other literary men want in their wives, but I am quite clear that I do not want a veneer of Italian art glued over a solid structure of American dollars. The Curtises are Edith’s latest friends. She had only known them about a week when she discovered that Bessie was just the wife for me. ”

“ The German got up from his knees and stumbled out of the room. I never saw him again, so I think he must have left the hotel.
“Now,” said Bessie, “go on with your book. Do you think you can finish it before lunch?”
“I’m inclined to leave this book for the present,” I said. “Let’s go in a gondola, and get ices. I know a shop in the Piazza where they have them really good.”
I am now convinced that Edith was quite right. The literary man who is lucky enough to get Bessie for a wife has fame and fortune within easy grasp. Difficulties simply disappear before her. ”

“ When I looked round the German was in full flight from the car, pursued by the waiter with the bill for his lunch.
Edith was certainly right about Bessie. German tourists are not the only enemies of the human race. I know editors who return manuscripts much better and in every way more suitable for publication than those which they print. A literary man with a wife like Bessie would, I think, have his revenge every time. ”

“ Every one smokes as much and as often as desirable. But Bessie saw her opportunity. She beckoned to the waiter, directed his attention first to the notice and then to the German’s cigar. She demanded in unmistakable pantomime that the German should at once be compelled to quench his cigar in his coffee. ”

“ I saw them sail away and heard Bessie urging on the gondolier in good Italian.
“Allegro,” she said. “Con molto spirito! Vivace! Fortissimo!”
Her music, I thought, must be better than her French.
I went peaceably to sleep. Women are different; but a man requires some sleep after traveling straight through from London to Venice. Besides, I had promised Edith that I would soak myself in the atmosphere of the place. I was wakened at eleven o’clock by the sound of the piano. There was a grand piano in the corner of the winter garden, and our German enemy was playing at it, hard. ”

“ He would have had to pay two hundred at least. A girl who would face the crowd on a French railway platform in a blue dressing-gown and drag sugarless coffee from unwilling men to whom she could not speak, all for the sake of an unattractive mother, would defeat any publisher living if she were fighting the battles of a husband whom she really loved.
We had no further adventures until after we left Milan. A restaurant car was hooked on to our train at that city, and I conducted my two ladies into it at about twelve o’clock. Mrs. Curtis at once asked me to open the window. ”

“ He looked at me malevolently. “I should,” he said, “much more easily and with less mental effort understand, if you in your own tongue speak. I have the English language fluently and idiomatically acquired.” ”

“ Curtis. My acquaintance with Bessie ripened later. Mrs. Curtis, I discovered, is one of those people who can not travel in a railway carriage unless the window is open. She is also the kind of person who always secures a corner seat with her back to the engine. Open windows do no harm to any one in that position. ”