“But you won’t find these old fellows so serious as you think,” Armstrong hastened to say. “They were humanists and products of the movement which marked the breaking away from the ascetic severity preceding them. But, after all, they were the first to realize that life could be even better worth living if it contained beauty and happiness.”
“You see how little I know about them, in spite of Helen’s attempt to place me on a pedestal.”
“Why, if it had not been for their work,” he continued, enthusiastically, “the classics might still have remained as dead to us as they were to those who lived in the thirteenth century. Instead of studying Virgil and Homer, we should have been brought up on theological literature and the ‘Holy Fathers.’”
“I feel just as I did at my coming-out party,” Inez replied—“that same feeling of awe and uncertainty. I am eager to go with you, yet I dread it somehow. It is not a presentiment exactly,—it is—”
“I know just what you mean,” Armstrong interrupted, sympathetically; “and, if you feel like that now, just wait until you see old Cerini, the librarian. It is he who is responsible for my passion for this sort of thing. Why, I remember, when I was here years ago and used to run in to see him at the Laurenziana, I never regarded him as a mortal at all; and I don’t believe my reverence and veneration for the old man have abated a whit in the twelve years gone by.”
The light vehicle had passed through the Porta alla Croce, and was swaying from side to side like a ship at sea, rattling over the stones of the narrow city streets at such a rate that conversation was no longer a pleasure.
“Just why Florentine cabmen are content to drive at a snail’s pace on a good road and feel impelled to rush at breakneck speed over bad ones is a phase of Italian character explained neither by Baedeker nor by Hare,” remarked Armstrong, leaning nearer to Inez to make himself heard.
With a loud snap of his whip and a guttural “Whee-oop,” the cocchiere rounded the statue of John of the Black Bands, just missed the ancient book-stand immortalized by Browning in the Ring and the Book, and came to a sudden stop before the unpretentious entrance to the Biblioteca Laurenziana.
“You have been here before, of course?” he asked his companion as they passed through the wicket-gate into the ancient cloisters of San Lorenzo.
“Once, with Baedeker to tell me to go on, and with the tall Italian custodian to stop me when I reached the red velvet rope stretched across the room, which I suppose marks the Dante division between Purgatory and Paradise.”