“I think I ought to tell you,” he said, “that my views have undergone a change since I saw you.”

Mrs. Portheris fixed her pince nez upon him in suspicious inquiry.

“I can even swallow the whale now,” he faltered, “like Jonah.”

CHAPTER XXII.

After two days of the most humid civility Mrs. Portheris had brought momma round.  It was not an easy process, momma had such a way of fanning herself and regarding distant objects; and Dicky and I observed its difficulties with great satisfaction, for a family matter would be the last thing anybody would venture to discuss with momma under such circumstances, and we very much preferred that Mrs. Portheris’s overflowing congratulations should be chilled off as long as possible.  Dicky was for taking my parents into our confidence as a measure of preparation, but with poppa’s commands upon me with regard to Arthur, I felt a delicacy as to the subject of engagements generally.  Besides, one never can tell whether one’s poppa and momma would back one up in a thing like that.

I never could quite understand Mrs. Portheris’s increasingly good opinion of us at this point.  The Senator declared that it was because some American shares of hers had gone up in the market, but that struck momma and me as somewhat too general in its application.  I preferred to attribute it to the Senator’s Tariff Bill.  Mr. Mafferton brought us the Times one evening in Verona, and pointed out with solemn congratulation that the name of J.P.  Wick was mentioned four times in the course of its leading article.  That journal even said in effect that, if it were not for the faithfully sustained anti-humorous character which had established it for so many generations in the approbation of the British public, it would go so far as to call the contemplated measure “Wicked legislation.”  Mr. Mafferton could not understand why poppa had no desire to cut out the article.  He said there was something so interesting about seeing one’s name in print—­he always did it.  I was very curious to see instances of Mr. Mafferton’s name in print, and finally induced him to show them to me.  They were mainly advertisements for lost dogs—­“Apply to the Hon. Charles Mafferton,” and the reward was very considerable.

But this has nothing to do with the way the plot thickened on the Lake of Como.  I was watching Bellagio slip past among the trees on the left shore and wondering whether we could hear the nightingales if it were not for the steamer’s engines—­which was particularly unlikely as it was the middle of the afternoon—­and thinking about the trifles that would sometimes divide lives plainly intended to mingle.  Mere enunciation, for example, was a thing one could so soon become reaccustomed to; already momma had ceased to congratulate me on my broad a’s, and I could not help the inference that my conversation was again unobtrusively Chicagoan.  It was frustrating,