Perhaps in nothing is the reality of her youthfulness so expressive as in her adorable gaiety.  Like a clear fresh spring, it is ever brimming up from the heart into her mischief-loving eyes.  By her side merely technically young people seem heavy and serious.  And nothing amuses her more than gravely to mystify, or even bewilderingly shock, some proper acquaintance, or some respectable strangers, with her carefully designed mock improprieties of speech or action.  To look at the loveliest of grand-mothers, it is naturally somewhat perplexing to the uninitiated visitor to hear her talk, with her rarely distinguished manner, of frivolous matters with which they assume she has long since done.

A short while ago, when I was taking tea with her, she had for visitor a staid old-maidish lady, little more than half her age, whom she had known as a girl, but had not seen for some years.  In the course of conversation, she turned to her guest, with her grand air: 

“Have you done much dancing this season?” she asked.

“O indeed no,” answered the other unsuspiciously, “my dancing days are over.”

“At your age!” commented Luccia with surprise.  “Nonsense!  You must let me teach you to dance the tango.  I have enjoyed it immensely this winter.”

“Really?” gasped the other in astonishment, with that intonation in the voice naturally so gratifying to the “old” suggesting that the person talking with them really regards them as dead and buried.

“Of course, why not?” asks Luccia with perfect seriousness.  “I dance it with my grandsons.  My husband doesn’t care to dance it.  He prefers the polka.”

Not knowing what to think, the poor old maid—­actually “old” compared with Luccia—­looked from her to the beautiful venerable figure of her polka-dancing husband seemingly meditating over his pipe, a little withdrawn from them on the veranda, but inwardly shaken with mirth at the darling nonsense of her who is still the same madcap girl he first fell in love with so many years ago.

When the guest had departed, with a puzzled, questioning look still lingering on her face, Luccia turned to me, her eyes bright pools of merriment: 

“It was quite true, wasn’t it?  Come, let us try it.”

And, nimble as a girl, she was on her feet, and we executed quite a passable tango up and down the veranda, to the accompaniment of her husband’s—­“Luccia!  Luccia! what a wild thing you are!”

A certain reputation for “wildness,” a savour of innocent Bohemianism, has clung to Luccia, and Irene too, all through their lives, as a legacy from that far-off legendary time when, scarcely out of their girlhood, they were fellow art-students together in Paris.  Belonging both to aristocratic, rather straitlaced New England families, I have often wondered how they contrived to accomplish that adventure in a day when such independent action on the part of two pretty young ladies was an adventure indeed.