sed the Apennines with a train-sick child and a
hot lady, who told them that never, never before had she sweated so
profusely. "Foreigners are a filthy nation," said Harriet. "I don't care
if there are tunnels; open the windows." He obeyed, and she got another
smut in her eye. Nor did Florence improve matters. Eating, walking, even
a cross word would bathe them both in boiling water. Philip, who was
slighter of build, and less conscientious, suffered less. But Harriet
had never been to Florence, and between the hours of eight and eleven
she crawled like a wounded creature through the streets, and swooned
before various masterpieces of art. It was an irritable couple who took
tickets to Monteriano.

"Singles or returns?" said he.

"A single for me," said Harriet peevishly; "I shall never get back
alive."

"Sweet creature!" said her brother, suddenly breaking down. "How helpful
you will be when we come to Signor Carella!"

"Do you suppose," said Harriet, standing still among a whirl of
porters--"do you suppose I am going to enter that man's house?"

"Then what have you come for, pray? For ornament?"

"To see that you do your duty."

"Oh, thanks!"

"So mother told me. For goodness sake get the tickets; here comes that
hot woman again! She has the impudence to bow."

"Mother told you, did she?" said Philip wrathfully, as he went to
struggle for tickets at a slit so narrow that they were handed to him
edgeways. Italy was beastly, and Florence station is the centre of
beastly Italy. But he had a strange feeling that he was to blame for it
all; that a little influx into him of virtue would make the whole land
not beastly but amusing. For there was enchantment, he was sure of that;
solid enchantment, which lay behind the porters and the screaming and
the dust. He could see it in the terrific blue sky beneath which they
travelled, in the whitened plain which gripped life tighter than a
frost, in the exhausted reaches of the Arno, in the ruins of brown
castles which stood quivering upon the hills. He could see it, though
his head ached and his skin was twitching, though he was here as a
puppet, and though his sister knew how he was here. There was nothing
pleasant in that journey to Monteriano station. But nothing--not even
the discomfort--was commonplace.

"But do people live inside?" asked Harriet. They had exchanged
railway-carriage for the legno, and the legno had emerged from the
withered trees, and had revealed