usly _devote_: they had never been so in their
younger days, and they were not of natures to be spiritualized by long
familiarity with life. Death could not be far off from most of them, but
they never spoke of it, never seemed to think of it; and, although life
was dull, they clung to it as by monotonous habit that _is_ but knows
not why.

* * * * *

Still another of our well-remembered _pensions_ was on the bright
Vesuvian Bay. The flaming mountain overlooked us, Naples floated beyond
us like a dream-city, before us the Mediterranean shimmered and shone
like a sultana's satin tunic. We could drop a stone from our windows
into the sea; we ran dripping from our sea-baths up long stairs, across
tiled balconies, into our vast rooms; all day and all night the swish
and lisp of the soft tides mingled with our voices and dreams.

As somebody said of us that summer, we were a "cosmopolitan mess," a
hotch-potch of nationalities, such as is always found in so general a
rendezvous as Italy. We were rather less of a hotch-potch, however, than
in London, but somehow it seemed to us that our peculiarities were more
salient than they could ever appear in proper and conventional
Bloomsbury. We were largely German, as the travelling population of
Italy is. In Bloomsbury our medium of expression was the English
language, and English was the language at table, no matter how foreign
our company. But in this Italian _pensione_, where the faces were
continually changing, the languages changed as often. One day only
English was the rule, and those who could not unite with the majority
remained mute. Another day, with a tremendous incursion of Teutons, who
always seem to travel in hordes, only German gutturals held the table,
and we who had no facility with them muttered meek French or sullen
English to our neighbors. The next day French would be the rule, and
Teuton must mumble in it and Anglo-Saxon stammer or hold its peace.
Curiously enough, although we were in Italy, Italian was rarely, almost
never, spoken among us, our only use of it being in orders to the
servants. Our landlady was English, with an Italian husband, but they
both held only upper menial places in the establishment, and never
dreamed of sitting at table with us or of meeting us upon any terms of
equality. This want of familiarity with Italian proves how little mere
travellers and haunters of _pensioni_ ever know of the middle-class
inhab