Prato."

"That lady looks so clever," whispered Miss Bartlett to her
cousin. "We are in luck."

And, indeed, a perfect torrent of information burst on them.
People told them what to see, when to see it, how to stop the
electric trams, how to get rid of the beggars, how much to give
for a vellum blotter, how much the place would grow upon them.
The Pension Bertolini had decided, almost enthusiastically, that
they would do. Whichever way they looked, kind ladies smiled and
shouted at them. And above all rose the voice of the clever lady,
crying: "Prato! They must go to Prato. That place is too sweetly
squalid for words. I love it; I revel in shaking off the trammels
of respectability, as you know."

The young man named George glanced at the clever lady, and then
returned moodily to his plate. Obviously he and his father did
not do. Lucy, in the midst of her success, found time to wish
they did. It gave her no extra pleasure that any one should be
left in the cold; and when she rose to go, she turned back and
gave the two outsiders a nervous little bow.

The father did not see it; the son acknowledged it, not by
another bow, but by raising his eyebrows and smiling; he seemed
to be smiling across something.

She hastened after her cousin, who had already disappeared
through the curtains--curtains which smote one in the face, and
seemed heavy with more than cloth. Beyond them stood the