“At Venice, I went to see ‘Pen Browning’ at the Palazzo Rezzonico, his most beautiful old palace, full of memorials of Pope Clement XIII. The son Browning has no likeness to either father or mother: he has worked hard, both as painter and sculptor, and has a good portrait as well as a bust of his father, from his own hands. There were many relics of his parents and their friends, amongst them a sketch by Rossetti of Tennyson reading one of his own poems to them, with an inscription by Mrs. Browning. ‘Pen’ was going off to his house at Asolo, a place which his father first brought into notice when he walked there and wrote ‘Pippa Passes.’
“Calling on a Mrs. Bronson in a neighbouring house, I met a young lady with fluffy hair, a Countess Mocenigo. ‘My dear, how many Doges had you in your family?’ said Mrs. B. ‘Seven,’ she answered, and there really were seven Doges of the name Mocenigo, besides all those from whom she was descended by the different marriages of her ancestors.
“Venice is still as full of odd stories as when my sister went to a party there, and was surprised because the oddly dressed old lady by her side never answered when she spoke, and then found she was made of wax. Most of the company were, being ancestors present thus in the family life of the present. Recently a lady named Berthold has lived at Venice who was of marvellous beauty and charm. All the society flocked to her parties. One evening she invited all her friends as usual. They found the palace splendidly lighted, and listened to the most exquisite music. At the close of the evening, curtains which concealed a platform at the end of the principal room were drawn aside, and within, the beautiful hostess was seen, seated on a throne, and sparkling with jewels, in all her resplendent loveliness. And then, as she waved a farewell to all present, the curtains were suddenly drawn, and she disappeared for ever. No human eye has seen her since. She had observed signs, unperceived by others, that her beauty was beginning to wane!
“In the hotel was a charming old lady who had just come back from Japan, and who was arrayed in a thick quilted and embroidered dress, presented to her by a Japanese lady. Her name, American fashion, was Mrs. Mary Ridge Perkins. Her husband had sent her abroad, as she said, ‘with a big letter of credit.’ ‘Mary, you may just go and do the honours of the old country alone.’ She hates English aristocrats, but was ameliorated towards Lord Digby, with whom she travelled back from Japan. He pressed her to come and see him in London—‘Not if you have your paint on.’ She has no children of her own, but, in the war, she and her husband adopted no less than thirty, who were rendered homeless. They all call her ‘Auntie Perkins,’ but their children call her grandmother. All the thirty are married now, and Mrs. Perkins never intends to leave her own home again, except to visit them. She came down to the gondola to see me off to the station with no bonnet on her aureole of short white curls, and I was touched by her parting benediction: ‘May your life always be happy, for you have always made others happy.’
“Here, at pleasant Cadenabbia, I have been glad to fall in with Lord and Lady Ripon. He said, ‘Do you know that you have been the cause of my buying a property in Italy?’ It was in consequence of the sentence in my ‘Cities of Central Italy’ beseeching some Roman Catholic nobleman to save such a sacred and historic place, that he had bought S. Chiara’s convent of S. Damiano near Assisi, giving its use to the monks on the sole condition that it was never to be ‘restored.’
“An odd thing has happened to me here, almost like a slight shadow on the path. I met —— who lives here, and whom I used to know very well, and went up to meet him with pleasure, and he cut me dead! I have not an idea why, and he will give no explanation. ‘Il faut apprendre de la vie à souffrir la vie.’
“The Archbishop of York and Augusta are at Cadenabbia, and have taken me across the lake in their little boat to tea with Charlie Dalison on that lovely terrace of Villa Serbelloni.”