la Borghese had
fancied putting about in pleasing stages of artificial dilapidation. But
there was nothing faked in the dishevelled grass of the little stadium,
with its gradines around the sides, and the game of tennis which some
young girls were playing in it. Neither was there anything ungenuine in
the rapture of the boy whom we saw racing through the dead leaves of
that woody hollow in chase of the wild fancies that fly before boyhood;
and I hope that the charm of the plinths and statues in the careless
grounds behind the soft, old, yellow Casino was a real charm. At any
rate, these things all consoled, and the turf under the pines, now
thickly starred with daisies, gave every assurance of being original.

When we came last the daisies were mingled with clustering anemones,
which seem a greatly overrated sort of flower, crude and harsh in color,
like cheap calico. If it were not for their pretty name I do not see how
people could like them; yet the children that day were pouncing upon
them and pulling them by handfuls; for the Villa Borghese is now state
property and is free to the children of the people in a measure quite
beyond Central Park. They can apparently pull anything they want, except
mushrooms; there are signs advising people that the state draws the line
at mushrooms.

It was once more a Sunday, and it was a free day in the Casino. The
trodden earth sent up its homely, kindly smell from many feet on their
way to the galleries, which we found full of people looking greater
intelligence than the frequenters of such places commonly betray. They
might have been such more cultivated sight-seers as could not afford to
come on the paydays, and, if they had not crowded the room so, one might
have been glad as well as proud to be of their number. They did not
really keep one from older friends, from the statues and the pictures
which were as familiarly there in 1908 as in 1864. In a world of
vicissitudes such things do not change; the Sacred and Profane Love of
Titian, though it had changed its name, had not changed its nature, and
was as divinely serene, as richly beautiful as before. The Veroneses
still glowed from the walls, dimming with their Venetian effulgence all
the other pictures but the Botticellis and the Francias, and comforting
one with the hope that, if one had always felt their beauty so much, one
might, without suspecting it, have always had some little sense of art.
But it was probably only a li