She had never before known what it was to have her lover
continuously with her. And his aid in those long corridors, where
bambinos smiled down at her with childish lips, helped her
wondrously to understand in so short a time what they sought to
convey to her. Alan was steeped in Italy; he knew and entered into
the spirit of Tuscan art; and now for the first time Herminia found
herself face to face with a thoroughly new subject in which Alan
could be her teacher from the very beginning, as most men are
teachers to the women who depend upon them. This sense of support
and restfulness and clinging was fresh and delightful to her. It
is a woman's ancestral part to look up to the man; she is happiest
in doing it, and must long remain so; and Herminia was not sorry to
find herself in this so much a woman. She thought it delicious to
roam through the long halls of some great gallery with Alan, and
let him point out to her the pictures he loved best, explain their
peculiar merits, and show the subtle relation in which they stood
to the pictures that went before them and the pictures that came
after them, as well as to the other work of the same master or his
contemporaries. It was even no small joy to her to find that he
knew so much more about art and its message than she did; that she
could look up to his judgment, confide in his opinion, see the
truth of his criticism, profit much by his instruction. So well
did she use those seven short days, indeed, that she came to
Florence with Fra Angelico, Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, mere names;
and she went away from it feeling that she had made them real
friends and possessions for a life-time.
So the hours whirled fast in those enchanted halls, and Herminia's
soul was enriched by new tastes and new interests. O towers of
fretted stone! O jasper and porphyry! Her very state of health
made her more susceptible than usual to fresh impressions, and drew
Alan at the same time every day into closer union with her. For
was not the young life now quickening within her half his and half
hers, and did it not seem to make the father by reflex nearer and
dearer to her? Surely the child that was nurtured, unborn, on
those marble colonnades and those placid Saint Catherines must draw
in with each pulse of its antenatal nutriment some tincture of
beauty, of freedom, of culture! So Herminia thought to herself as
she lay awake at night and looked out of the window from the
curtains of her bed at the boundless dome and the tall campanile
gleaming white in the moonlight. So we have each of us thought--
especially the mothers in Israel among us--about the unborn babe
that hastens along to its birth with such a radiant halo of the
possible future ever gilding and glorifying its unseen forehead.