The Darts of Cupid: Stories (28 page)

"Very well," I said. "I was born in Prague. And Prague is in Bohemia, so I am Czech. And that is the last you will get out of me."

He stepped into the corridor, lit his cigarette, and came back and gave me the lighter with a delighted grin.

All the other passengers in my compartment got out at Milan, and I was then joined by a youngster, who, reading "Richardes" on the label of my suitcase, fell at once into excellent American English. The trouble with foreigners, he told me, was that they all thought he was Italian. But he was not Italian—he was Milanese. The worst of all foreigners were the young girls, because they spoke stupidly and made impossible romantic demands, wanted a Latin lover and all that rot. For the rest of the journey he kept telling me why he was not going to commit suicide.

Acknowledgments

I wish to express my deepest gratitude to Roger Angell, the fiction editor at
The New Yorker,
who was the first reader of most of these stories, and who possessed an almost telepathic feeling for what it was I meant to say. His intelligence and care as an editor have been invaluable to me over the years.

I also wish to thank my agent, David McCormick, for his devotion to my work and his good sense.

Edith Templeton

The Darts of Cupid

Edith Templeton was born in Prague in 1916, and spent much of her childhood in a castle in the Bohemian countryside. She was educated at a French
lycée
in Prague, and left that city in 1938 to marry an Englishman. During her years in Britain, she worked in the Office of the Chief Surgeon for the U.S. Army in Cheltenham, and then became a captain in the British Army, working as a high-level conference interpreter. Her short stories began to appear in
The New Yorker
in the fifties, and over the next several decades she published a number of novels, as well as a popular travel book, The Surprise of Cremona, in the United Kingdom.

Mrs. Templeton left England in 1956 to live in India with her second husband, a celebrated cardiologist. She has since lived in various parts of Europe, and now makes her home in Bordighera, on the coast of Italy.

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MARCH 2003

Copyright © 2002 by Edith Templeton

Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Grateful acknowledgment is made to
The New Yorker
, where the following stories originally appeared: "The Darts of Cupid," "Equality Cake," "Irresistibly," "The Dress Rehearsal," and "Nymph & Faun."

"A Coffeehouse Acquaintance" originally appeared in Three: 1971. Copyright © 1971 by Random House, Inc. Published by Random House, Inc., New York, 1971.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Pantheon edition as follows:

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