ht in
Rome.

Nor was our temper improved when J.'s instinct, which in a strange place
takes him straight where he wants to go, having got us into the
_Ghetto_, failed to get us out again. The _Ghetto_ itself was all right,
so what a _Ghetto_ ought to be that had I been the Romans, I would not
have pulled it down, I would have preserved it as a historical
monument,--dirty, dark and mysterious, a labyrinth of narrow crooked
streets, lined with tall grim houses, filled with melodramatic shadows
and dim figures skulking in them, but a nightmare of a labyrinth which
kept bringing us forever back to the same spot. And we could not dine
on picturesqueness, and we would not have dined in any of the
murderous-looking houses at any price, and at last J. admitted that
there were times when a native might be a better guide than instinct,
and in his best Italian he asked the way of two men who were passing.
One, who wore the tweeds and flannel shirt by which in calmer moments we
must have recognized him, pulled the other by the sleeve and growled in
English: "Come on, don't bother about the beastly foreigners!" I can
afford to forgive him to-day when I remember what his incivility cost
him not only that night, when we would not let him off until he had
shown us out of the _Ghetto_, but on a succession of our nights in Rome,
Fate having neatly arranged that at the one house whose doors were
opened to us he should be a constant visitor.

Other doors might have opened had we had the clothes in which to knock
at them. But we had come to Rome for four days with no more baggage than
the tandem could carry, and we stayed four months without adding to it.
We could have sent for our trunks, of course, or we could have bought
new things in the Roman shops, but we did neither, I can hardly say why
except that the story of our journey had to be finished, and other
delightful articles we had crossed the Atlantic to do were waiting, and
these were commissions that could not be neglected, since they were the
capital upon which we had started out on our married life five months
before. And our Letter of Credit was small, and Youth is stern with
itself;--or, more likely, we did not trouble simply because it saved so
much more trouble not to. No woman would have to be taught by Ibsen or
anybody else how to live her own life, were she willing to live it in
shabby clothes. It is not an easy thing to do, I know. I share the
weakness of most women in f