She looked so bright and coaxing, and the others so cordially
joined in her request, that the Signora could not but consent, though usually shy of reading her unpublished productions to any one.
“How I like hot noons!” she sighed through a smile of languid contentment, leaning back in her chair, and dropping in her lap the folded paper Bianca had brought her. “I found out the charm of them when I was in Frascati. At this early season the heat of the city, too, is good—a pure scorch and scald. In August it is likely to be thick and morbid. That first noon in Frascati was a new experience to me. I went to see Villa Torlonia, which was open to the public only between the hours of eleven and five—a time when scarcely any one, especially any Italian, wants to go out in hot weather. I wished to see the villa, however, and I went, stealing along the shadowy edges of streets, and down a long stairway street that is nearly or always shaded by the tall houses at either side and the hill behind, catching my breath as I passed through the furnace of sunshine in the open piazza, finally, with my face in a flame, stepping under the great trees inside the gate, and pausing to refresh myself a little before going on. There was still the open terrace to pass, and the grand unshaded steps to ascend; but it was easier to go forward than back, for a few minutes would bring me to avenues as dim as Ave Maria time. I stood a little and dreaded the sun. The casino and the gravel of the terrace and the steps were reflecting it so that one might almost have fancied the rays clashed on each other in the midst of the opening. The rose-trees in the flower-garden looked as if they bore clusters of fire-coals, and some sort of flowering tree in the green spaces
between the stairs seemed to be breaking out into flame with its red and yellow blossoms. I remembered Mrs. Browning’s
“‘The flowers that burn, and the trees that aspire,
And the insects made of a song or a fire.’”
She paused to lay a laurel leaf over a carafon of cream that a fly was buzzing about, then exclaimed: “Why wasn’t that woman a Catholic, and why isn’t she alive now, that I may kiss her hand, and her cheek, if she would let me? Fancy such a genius consecrated to religion! You know the other stanza of that poem I have just quoted:
“‘And, oh! for a seer to discern the same,’
Sighed the South to the North;
‘For the poet’s tongue of baptismal flame,