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and that they were among the advantages she couldn’t have
enjoyed for instance in Albany. In the clear May mornings
before the formal breakfast—this repast at Mrs. Touchett’s
was served at twelve o’clock—she wandered with her cousin
through the narrow and sombre Florentine streets, rest-
ing a while in the thicker dusk of some historic church
or the vaulted chambers of some dispeopled convent. She
went to the galleries and palaces; she looked at the pictures
and statues that had hitherto been great names to her, and
exchanged for a knowledge which was sometimes a limita-
tion a presentiment which proved usually to have been a
blank. She performed all those acts of mental prostration
in which, on a first visit to Italy, youth and enthusiasm so
freely indulge; she felt her heart beat in the presence of im-
mortal genius and knew the sweetness of rising tears in eyes
to which faded fresco and darkened marble grew dim. But
the return, every day, was even pleasanter than the going
forth; the return into the wide, monumental court of the
great house in which Mrs. Touchett, many years before, had
established herself, and into the high, cool rooms where the
carven rafters and pompous frescoes of the sixteenth cen-
tury looked down on the familiar commodities of the age of
advertisement. Mrs. Touchett inhabited an historic build-
ing in a narrow street whose very name recalled the strife
of mediaeval factions; and found compensation for the
darkness of her frontage in the modicity of her rent and the
brightness of a garden where nature itself looked as archaic
as the rugged architecture of the palace and which cleared
and scented the rooms in regular use. To live in such a place

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