There were many French phrases and a few Italian ones scattered through Aunt Clo's conversation, and she frequently gave a strangely foreign construction to the sentences that she spoke in English.
Lily was impressed by her fluency, by the perfection of her French, and by a certain humorous candour that Aunt Clo displayed in voicing her opinions.
Nevertheless, she could not quite kill her remembrance of having, as a child, disliked Aunt Clo.
Outside the station was a very small waggonette with a striped red and yellow awning. A sleepy, good-natured-looking peasant, his shirt open at the neck, sat on the box.
"Ecco, Umbertino!"
Miss Stellenthorpe waved her niece into the waggonette and sprang in after her. The vigor of her ascent seemed out of all proportion to the dilatory progress that they made along a baked and arid-looking road, the fields on either side unrelieved by any shade.
"But the vineyards round Genazzano!" said Aunt Clo expressively. "Patienza!"
Genazzano proved to be a small village consisting of one cobble-stoned street, winding up the side of a steep hill, and an ancient grey pile that stood raised from the roadside at the top of half a dozen irregular steps.
"The Cathedrale," Aunt Clo introduced it.
A mattress, imperfectly concealed behind a heavy red curtain, hung before the entrance to the cathedral after the Italian fashion.