, a tithe of its dinners, a quarter of its machinery, none of
its factories, and a wholly different atmosphere!" I suppose this means
that he dislikes it. I think him handsomer than ever. I sent you his
photograph, but that can give you no idea of him. He is like one of his
own marble statues. We came to Coombe-Bysset directly after the
ceremony, and we are here still. I could stay on forever. It is so
lovely in these Bedfordshire woods in mid-June. But I am afraid--just
the very least bit afraid--that Piero may get bored with
me--me--me--nothing but me. He is an angel. We ride in the morning, we
sing and play in the evening. We adore each other all the twenty-four
hours through. I wonder how I could have lived without him. I am longing
to see all he tells me about his great marble palaces, and his immense
dream-like villas, and his gardens with their multitude of statues, and
the wonderful light that is over it all. He protests it is always
twilight with us in England. It seems so absurd, when nowadays everybody
knows everything about everywhere, that I should never have been to
Italy. But we were such country mice down at dear old, dull, green,
muddy Ditchworth. Lanciano, the biggest of all their big places, must be
like a poem. It is a great house, all of different-colored marbles, set
amidst ilex groves on the mountainside, with cascades like Terni, and
gardens that were planned by Giulio Romano, and temples that were there
in the days of Horace. I long to see it all, and yet I hope he will not
want to leave Coombe yet. There is no place like the place where one is
_first_ happy. And, somehow, I fancy I look better in these homely low
rooms of Aunt Carrie's, with their Chippendale furniture and their smell
of dry rose-leaves, than I shall do in those enormous palaces which want
a Semiramis or a Cleopatra. They were kind enough to make a fuss about
me in London, but I never thought much of myself, and I am afraid I must
seem rather dull to Piero, who is so brilliant himself and has all kinds
of talents. You know I never was clever, and really--really--I haven't
an idea what to talk to him about when we don't talk about ourselves.
And then the weather provokes him. We have hardly had one fine day since
we came; and no doubt it seems very gray and chilly to an Italian. "It
cannot be June!" he says, a dozen times a week. And when the whole day
is rainy, as it is very often, for our Junes are such wet ones nowadays,
I can