“Does this mean we shan’t see you here next year?” asked Dora, laughing because Bernard had come there for so many years.

Bernard laughed, too. “Well, you English, you find a sort of prodigality here, too—an easy acceptance which you enjoy but which, after all, you don’t wish to emulate.”

“You mean that we have scruples about giving but none about receiving?” Charles asked.

“Not even that,” Bernard said. “I simply mean that in our countries one must still be prepared for a few surprises, but here all experience is repetition, and that gives one an outrageous sense of proportion. That’s why we feel so comfortable—why we find it so attractive to come here. After all, France is certainly as beautiful as this”—Bernard included the Italian peninsula in a brief gesture.

“And England,” said Miss Nicholson, misunderstanding.

“Well, it isn’t a competition, after all,” replied Charles, filling her wineglass. “Do you know France, Miss Nicholson?”

Miss Nicholson replied that she did not, adding that she had been there several times.

The new guest remarked that she knew France well but that this was her first visit to Italy, and took the opportunity to resume her account of it. Yes, Florence was lovely, lovely, but a week was nothing, one must go back. “There is too much, far too much,” she added accusingly. With a forkful of salad she indicated infinite riches.

“And you.” Dora turned to the boy beside her. “What did you think of Florence?”

He stared at her uneasily, shifting his feet on the pebbles beneath the table. His mother’s face clouded with a recognizable intensification of the discontent already seen there. “He scarcely saw anything of Florence,” she said. “He wouldn’t even have seen the cathedral if I hadn’t insisted on it.”

“I had to do some work,” he murmured.

His mother appealed to the table. “Such an opportunity at his age. One would think he’d make the most of it.” She gave the three boys a covetous, comparing look. Disconcerted, they vaguely protested their own inertia, not wishing to appear to advantage.

“I’m determined that he shall see Siena properly,” she persisted.

Something in this prospect seemed to dishearten the boy even further, and he went on with his meal. He did not look at his mother. While she chatted on again about Florence—the heat, the della Robbias, the bargains in tooled leather—she directed toward him a current of censure and disappointment, evoking from him a slow, painful awareness.