Somewhat later in the day, they went out for a stroll through the

town together. To Herminia's great relief, Alan never even noticed

she had been crying. Man-like, he was absorbed in his own delight.

She would have felt herself a traitor if Alan had discovered it.

"Which way shall we go?" she asked listlessly, with a glance to

right and left, as they passed beneath the sombre Tuscan gate of

their palazzo.

And Alan answered, smiling, "Why, what does it matter? Which way

you like. Every way is a picture."

And so it was, Herminia herself was fain to admit, in a pure

painter's sense that didn't at all attract her. Lines grouped

themselves against the sky in infinite diversity. Whichever way

they turned quaint old walls met their eyes, and tumble-down

churches, and mouldering towers, and mediaeval palazzi with carved

doorways or rich loggias. But whichever way they turned dusty

roads too confronted them, illimitable stretches of gloomy suburb,

unwholesome airs, sickening sights and sounds and perfumes. Narrow

streets swept, darkling, under pointed archways, that framed

distant vistas of spire or campanile, silhouetted against the solid

blue sky of Italy. The crystal hardness of that sapphire firmament

repelled Herminia. They passed beneath the triumphal arch of

Augustus with its Etruscan mason-work, its Roman decorations, and

round the antique walls, aglow with tufted gillyflowers, to the

bare Piazza d'Armi. A cattle fair was going on there; and Alan

pointed with pleasure to the curious fact that the oxen were all

cream-colored,--the famous white steers of Clitumnus. Herminia

knew her Virgil as well as Alan himself, and murmured half aloud

the sonorous hexameter, "Romanos ad templa deum duxere triumphos."

But somehow, the knowledge that these were indeed the milk-white

bullocks of Clitumnus failed amid so much dust to arouse her

enthusiasm. She would have been better pleased just then with a

yellow English primrose.

They clambered down the terraced ravines sometimes, a day or two

later, to arid banks by a dry torrent's bed where Italian primroses

really grew, interspersed with tall grape-hyacinths, and scented

violets, and glossy cleft leaves of winter aconite. But even the

primroses were not the same thing to Herminia as those she used to

gather on the dewy slopes of the Redlands; they were so dry and

dust-grimed, and the path by the torrent's side was so distasteful

and unsavory. Bare white boughs of twisted fig-trees depressed

her. Besides, these hills were steep, and Herminia felt the

climbing. Nothing in city or suburbs attracted her soul. Etruscan

Volumnii, each lolling in white travertine on the sculptured lid of

his own sarcophagus urn, and all duly ranged in the twilight of

their tomb at their spectral banquet, stirred her heart but feebly.

St. Francis, Santa Chiara, fell flat on her English fancy. But as

for Alan, he revelled all day long in his native element. He

sketched every morning, among the huddled, strangled lanes;

sketched churches and monasteries, and portals of palazzi; sketched

mountains clear-cut in that pellucid air; till Herminia wondered

how he could sit so long in the broiling sun or keen wind on those

bare hillsides, or on broken brick parapets in those noisome

byways. But your born sketcher is oblivious of all on earth save

his chosen art; and Alan was essentially a painter in fibre,

diverted by pure circumstance into a Chancery practice.




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