others I do not wish to judge, except when they make foolish pretences.”
The Signora had sometimes displeased some of her friends by talking in this manner and pricking their vainglorious bubbles; and she consistently felt that, according to his light, Mr. Vane was forbearing with his daughters and with her, and that they should show some forbearance with him. She was, therefore, not displeased with him for his unintentional mocking. Her cloud came from another direction. She found herself changing a little, growing less evenly contented with her life, alternating unpleasantly between moods of happiness and depression. While she lived alone, receiving her friends for a few hours at a time, she had found her life tranquil and satisfying. Sympathy and kind services were always at hand, and there was always the equal or greater pleasure of sympathy and kind services demanded to make of friendship a double benefit. But the question had begun to glance now and then across her mind whether she had been altogether wise in taking this family into her house, having before her eyes the constant spectacle of an affection and intimacy such as she had left outside her own experience, and had no desire to invite or admit, even while she felt its charm. She, quite deprived of all family ties, felt sometimes a loneliness which she had never before experienced, in witnessing the affection of the father and his daughters; and, at the same time that she saw them as enclosed in a magic circle from which she was excluded, she looked forward with dread to the time when they should leave her, with a new void in her life, and a serenity permanently disturbed, perhaps. There
were little moments, short and sharp, when she could have sympathized with Faust casting aside with passionate contempt his worthless gifts and learning at sight of the simple happiness of love and youth.
But these moments and moods were short and disconnected. She was scarcely aware of them, scarcely remembered that each, as it came, was not the first, and her life flowed between them always pleasantly, sometimes joyfully. She was quite gay and happy when they ran down to the carriage and hurried to the station.
The morning was delicious, everything washed clean and fresh by the plentiful shower. A light, pearly cloud covered the sky, veiling all with a delicate softness that was to sunshine as contentment is to joy. Here and there a deep shadow slept on the landscape. Our little party took possession of a first-class car, and seated, each at a corner of it, were every moment calling attention to some new beauty. Isabel glanced with delight along the great aqueduct lines and the pictures they framed, all blurred and swimming with the birds with which the stone arches were alive; Bianca watched the mountain, her eyes full of poetical fancies; and Mr. Vane presently fell in love with a square of solid green he espied in the midst of the bare Campagna, a little paradise, where the trees and flowers seemed to be bursting with luxuriance over the walls, and regarding with astonishment the dead country about them, that stretched off its low waves and undulations in strong and stubborn contrast with that redundant spot.
“Aladdin’s lamp must have done it,” he said; and after a moment added, having followed the subject a little in his own mind: “I am inclined
to think that one element of the picturesque must be inconsistency. Ah! here are your white Campagna cattle we have heard so much about. Aren’t they of rather a bluish color?”
“But look and see what they are eating, papa,” Bianca said. “No wonder it turns them blue.”
The ground all about was deeply colored with blue flowers, in the midst of which these large, white cattle wandered, feeding lazily, as if eating were a pleasure, not a necessity. They were like people reading poetry.
“We do not often have such a day here,” the Signora said, “and to me the clouds are a luxury. I own that I have sometimes grown weary of seeing that spotless blue overhead week after week, month after month, even. Clouds are tender, and give infinite lights and shades. The first winter I spent in Rome there were a hundred days in succession of windless, cloudless, golden weather, beginning in October, and lasting till after New Year’s day. Then came a sweet three days’ rain, which enchanted me. I went out twice a day in it.”