to see you
without a bright waistcoat. Why haven't you got a bright waistcoat on?"
I apologised for my black one, and was sent upstairs, when ----
presently appeared in a hideous and demoniacal nightdress, having turned
out of bed to greet his distinguished countryman. After a long talk, in
the course of which I arranged to dine there on Sunday early, before
starting by the steamer for Naples, and in which they told me every
possible and impossible particular about their minutest affairs, and
especially about ----'s marriage, I set off for ----, at ----. I had
found letters from him here, and he had been here over and over again,
and had driven out no end of times to the Gate to leave messages for me,
and really is (in his strange uncouth way) crying glad to see me. I
found him and his wife in a little comfortable country house,
overlooking the sea, sitting in a small summer-house on wheels, exactly
like a bathing machine. I found her rather pretty, extraordinarily cold
and composed, a mere piece of furniture, _talking broken English_.
Through eight months in the year they live in this country place. She
never reads, never works, never talks, never gives an order or directs
anything, has only a taste for going to the theatre (where she never
speaks either) and buying clothes. They sit in the garden all day, dine
at four, _smoke their cigars_, go in at eight, sit about till ten, and
then go to bed. The greater part of this I had from ---- himself in a
particularly unintelligible confidence in the garden, the only portion
of which that I could clearly understand were the words "and one thing
and another," repeated one hundred thousand times. He described himself
as being perfectly happy, and seemed very fond of his wife. "But that,"
said ---- to me this morning, looking like the figure-head of a ship,
with a nutmeg-grater for a face, "that he ought to be, and must be, and
is bound to be--he couldn't help it."

Then I went on to the ----'s, and found them living in a beautiful
situation in a ruinous Albaro-like palace. Coming upon them unawares, I
found ----, with a pointed beard, smoking a great German pipe, in a pair
of slippers; the two little girls very pale and faint from the climate,
in a singularly untidy state--one (heaven knows why!) without stockings,
and both with their little short hair cropped in a manner never before
beheld, and a little bright bow stuck on the top of it. ---- said she
had invented this head