Page 319 - the-portrait-of-a-lady

Chapter 22

On one of the first days of May, some six months after old
Mr. Touchett’s death, a small group that might have been
described by a painter as composing well was gathered in
one of the many rooms of an ancient villa crowning an ol-
ive-muffled hill outside of the Roman gate of Florence. The
villa was a long, rather blank-looking structure, with the
far-projecting roof which Tuscany loves and which, on the
hills that encircle Florence, when considered from a dis-
tance, make so harmonious a rectangle with the straight,
dark, definite cypresses that usually rise in groups of three
or four beside it. The house had a front upon a little grassy,
empty, rural piazza which occupied a part of the hill-top;
and this front, pierced with a few windows in irregular re-
lations and furnished with a stone bench lengthily adjusted
to the base of the structure and useful as a lounging-place
to one or two persons wearing more or less of that air of
undervalued merit which in Italy, for some reason or other,
always gracefully invests any one who confidently assumes
a perfectly passive attitude—this antique, solid, weather-
worn, yet imposing front had a somewhat incommunicative
character. It was the mask, not the face of the house. It had
heavy lids, but no eyes; the house in reality looked anoth-
er way—looked off behind, into splendid openness and the
range of the afternoon light. In that quarter the villa over-

319