. .
We were not able to seize upon the choicest luxuries of living, as our
accommodations, even such as they were, proved to be expensive enough
to hamper us. We had all expected to be blissful in Italy, and so the
inartistic and inhuman accessories of life were harder to bear there
than elsewhere. I remember a perpetual rice pudding (sent in the tin
ten-story edifices which caterers supply laden with food), of which
the almost daily sight maddened us, and threw us into a Burton's
melancholy of silence, for nothing could prevent it from appearing. We
all know what such simple despairs can do, and, by concerted movement,
they can make Rome tame. If we had sustained ourselves on milk, like
Romulus and Remus, and dressed in Russian furs, we might have had
fewer vicissitudes in the midst of the classic wonders on all sides.
But spring was faithful, and at its return we began to enjoy the
scenes of most note within and beyond the walls: the gleaming ruins,
and fresh, uncontaminated daisies that trustfully throve beside some
of them; the little fountains, with their one-legged or flat-nosed
statues strutting ineffectually above them,--fountains either dry as
dead revelers or tinkling a pathetic sob into a stone trough; the open
views where the colors of sunlit marble and the motions of dancing
light surrounded the peasants who sprang up from the ground like
belated actors in a drama we only keep with us out of childish
delight.
My father had never looked so serious as he did now, and he was more
slim than in England.
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