Just now her last extravagance has been to order three and six worth of White Honesty at ninepence a dozen, to plant in among the new Rhododendrons; and she is suffused with satisfaction at the prospect of anything so cheap and charming. We recommend the effect, discovered quite accidentally.
We have really abominable weather. It is very unusual.
“Oh, to be in England,
Now that April’s there!”
is an aspiration justified as a rule by a tender interlude between the tantrums of March and the asperities of May. Last year April came in skipping like a kid on the Campagna, even its freakishness full of attraction. Is anything more charming than to see the kids playing among the flocks, as one drives along those roads of haunting and mysterious beauty—under that sky incomparable in its gem-like purity; to see the shepherd in his sheepskin seated on a fence with his legs cross-bandaged, the shrill pipe to his lips; to hear his wild strain and know that it was all just the same a thousand years ago and more? The kids, as they leap out of the scattered flocks, are cut against the blue as on some classic frieze; the tawny, melancholy plain falls and rises and falls again till the hills amethystine, snow-capped, close the field of vision in the far distance! The broken line of an aqueduct gleams as if golden.
“To be in Italy,
Now that April’s there!”
Loki’s Grandmother believes she would give up her country and Villino Loki, and expatriate herself for ever gladly. But Italy is not expatriation, it is the home of the soul. ‹Loki’s Grandpa says he quite admits all that—but that for a permanency he prefers his Surrey hills.›
The fires on the Campagna are rose-carmine as the pointed flames pulsate upwards. Our fires here are only just the usual yellows. Where is it that Italy holds the secret? Is it in the translucence of the atmosphere? How the sunlight there lies on a common plaster wall! How the stone flushes! Just a little white Villino on a hill-side stands in a radiance of its own, and is not white at all but topaz coloured!