Most famous towns, in fact, need to be twice seen: the first time
briefly to face the inevitable disappointment to our expectations;
the second time, at leisure, to reconstruct and appraise the
surviving reality. Imagination so easily beggars performance.
Rome, Cairo, the Nile, are obvious examples; the grand exceptions
are Venice and Florence,--in a lesser degree, Bruges, Munich, Pisa.
As for Umbria, 'tis a poor thing; our own Devon snaps her fingers
at it.
Moreover, to say the truth, Herminia was too fresh to Italy to
appreciate the smaller or second-rate towns at their real value.
Even northerners love Florence and Venice at first sight; those
take their hearts by storm; but Perugia, Siena, Orvieto, are an
acquired taste, like olives and caviare, and it takes time to
acquire it. Alan had not made due allowance for this psychological
truth of the northern natures. A Celt in essence, thoroughly
Italianate himself, and with a deep love for the picturesque, which
often makes men insensible to dirt and discomfort, he expected to
Italianize Herminia too rapidly. Herminia, on the other hand,
belonged more strictly to the intellectual and somewhat inartistic
English type. The picturesque alone did not suffice for her.
Cleanliness and fresh air were far dearer to her soul than the
quaintest street corners, the oddest old archways; she pined in
Perugia for a green English hillside.
The time, too, was unfortunate, after no rain for weeks; for
rainlessness, besides doubling the native stock of dust, brings out
to the full the ancestral Etruscan odors of Perugia. So, when next
morning Herminia found herself installed in a dingy flat, in a
morose palazzo, in the main street of the city, she was glad that
Alan insisted on going out alone to make needful purchases of
groceries and provisions, because it gave her a chance of flinging
herself on her bed in a perfect agony of distress and disappointment,
and having a good cry, all alone, at the aspect of the home where
she was to pass so many eventful weeks of her existence.
Dusty, gusty Perugia! O baby, to be born for the freeing of woman,
was it here, was it here you must draw your first breath, in an air
polluted by the vices of centuries!