Towards the end of the week, however, Dicky grew remorseful.  “It’s all very well,” he said to me privately, “for Mrs. Wick to say that she could spend a lifetime in Florence, if the houses only had a few modern conveniences.  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.  The hotel had a little courtyard, with an orange tree in the middle and palms in pots, and we came down the wide marble stairs, past the statues on the landing, and the paintings on the walls, to find dinner laid on round tables out there, I remember.  A note of momma’s occurs here to the effect that there is a great deal too much fine art in Italian hotels, with a reference to the fact that the one at Naples had the whole of Pompeii painted on the dining room walls.  She considers this practice embarrassing to the public mind, which has no way of knowing whether to admire these things or not, though personally we boldly decided to scorn them all.  This, however, has nothing to do with poppa and the commercial traveller.  We knew he was a commercial traveller by the way he put his toothpick in his pocket, though poppa said afterwards that he was not exceptionally endowed for that line of business.  He was dining at our table, and by his gratified manner when we sat down, it was plain that he could speak English and would be very pleased to do so.  Poppa, knowing that his time was short, began at once.

“You belong to Bologna, sir?” he inquired with his first spoonful of soup.  For some reason it seems impossible to address a stranger at a table d’hote, before the soup takes the baldness off the situation.

The gentleman smiled.  He had a broad, open, amiable, red face, with a short black beard and a round head covered with thick hair in curls, beautifully parted.  “I do not think I belong,” he said; “my house of business, it is at Milan, and I am born at Finalmarina.  But I come much to Bologna, yes.”