I daresay she could--and as for your poppa, he's as patient as if this were a Washington hotel and he had a caucus every night, but it's as plain as Dante's nose that the Senator's dead sick of this city." "Dicky," I said, "that is a reflection of your own state of mind.

Poppa is willing to take as much more Botticelli and Filippo Lippi as it may be necessary to give him." "Oh, I know he _would_" Dicky admitted, "but he isn't as young as he was, and I should hate to feel I was imposing on him.

Besides, I'm beginning to conclude that they've skipped Florence." So it came to pass that we departed for Venice next day, tarrying one night at Bologna.

We had cut a day off Bologna for Dicky's sake, but the Senator could not be persuaded to sacrifice it altogether on account of its well known manufacture, into the conditions of which he wished to inquire.

The shops, as we drove to the hotel, seemed to expose nothing else for sale, but poppa said that, in spite of the local consumption, it had certainly fallen off, and, as an official representative of one of its great rivals in the west, he naturally felt a compunctious interest in the state of the industry.