“That’s us?” Miss Parker inquired.
“Not you,” Anthon smiled; “you belong to the woods.”
“Thank you! You mean the backwoods.”
“And you?” Anthon asked.
“We’ve done Germany and northern Italy. So many hotels and people and pictures and towns and cities. It has been great!” Anthon could see her at the Grand Hotel this or that, calling all the lap-dogs by their pet names, and on good terms with nearly every comer, from the fat Polish countess to the gentlemanly English loafer. “But Italy was best,” her eyes softened dreamily. “The dear people, with their fat little babies, and those stagey mountains. It was like going to the opera all day long. Shall we start?”
Miss Parker chatted briskly at him, unawed by his importance, while they crawled down the Champs Elysées on the imperiale of an omnibus. She had scoffed at the idea of taking a cab, and forced Anthon to run the risk of being observed by his acquaintances as he swayed to and fro and clutched at his tall hat. It took them a good while to escape the importunate guides, the venders of photographs, and the other obstructions that beset the great palace.
“It’s like a dance-hall outside and a tomb in,” Miss Parker reflected. “All these bronzes in this heavy-arched room are such a cold welcome. They seem like a procession of the dead drawn up to receive you.”
When they came to the grand staircase, with its glorious crown of the Niké, Anthon brought out some classical learning to amuse his companion with.
“What a lovely body, and what splendid wings, real angels’ wings,” she exclaimed unheedingly.
They paused before the mutilated Botticelli frescos, and spent some minutes tracing out the dim outlines of figures, until he persisted in comparing her with the virgin being led to the altar. Then they idly sauntered into the neighbouring French rooms, those succeeding caverns of past echoes, each one with its special manner, its own atmosphere, its individual way of putting together the minute details of life. Here and there were copyists, lazily working, chiefly old women and men,—antiquated professors who had returned to the idols of their youth. The Madame Le Bruns, the Watteaus, and Chardonels came out on the new canvases with a metallic lustre, an indecency of corporeal resurrection.