She was looking at the clustering towers of the city, at Brunelleschi's magnificent dome, and the slender grace of Giotto's Campanile, and thence, from those storied trophies of transcendant art, her gaze wandered to the rich valley of the Arno, with its slopes of green and grey, and its distant line of purple peaks against an opalescent sky.
"It is more beautiful in spring. I miss the glow and scent of the flowers—the scarlet tulips, the sweet violets," said Mrs. Hartley.
"I cannot imagine anything more beautiful," Edith Dalton rejoined. "One feels oppressed with so much loveliness. It is beyond expression."
"Silence is most eloquent, perhaps, in a place like this," said Lettice. "What can one say that is worth saying, or that has not been said before?"
She was sitting on a fragment of fallen stone, her hands loosely clasped round her knees, her eyes fixed wistfully and dreamily upon the faint amethystine tints of the distant hills. Brooke Dalton looked down at her with an anxious eye. He did not altogether like this pensive mood of hers; there was something melancholy in the drooping curves of her lips, in the pathos of her wide gaze, which he did not understand. He tried to speak lightly, in hopes of recalling her to the festive mood in which they had all begun the day.
"You remind me of two friends of mine who are just home from Egypt. They say that when they first saw the Sphinx they sat down and looked at it for two hours without uttering a word."
"You would not have done that, Brooke," said Mrs. Hartley, a little maliciously.
"But why not? I think it was the right spirit," said Lettice, and again lapsed into silence.
"Look at the Duomo, how well it stands out in the evening light!" exclaimed Edith. "Do you remember what Michael Angelo said when he turned and looked at it before riding away to Rome to build St. Peter's? 'Come te non voglio: meglio di te non posso.'"
"I am always struck by his generosity of feeling towards other artists," remarked Mrs. Hartley. "Except towards Raffaelle, perhaps. But think of what he said of Santa Maria Novella, that it was beautiful as a bride, and that the Baptistery gates were worthy of Paradise. It is only the great who can afford to praise so magnificently."