y
had been wisely disposed of, and that instead of paying people for
keeping an uninhabited palace in order, she was receiving an enormous
rent for it from the city.

Then she had wished to see the lovely villa that came back in the
pictures of her dreams, and she had been driven out into the country
according to her desire. From a distance, as the carriage approached it,
she recognized the lordly poplars, and far at the end of the avenue the
elaborately stuccoed front and cornices of the old-fashioned "barocco"
building. But the gardens were gone. Files of neatly trimmed vines,
trained upon poles stuck in deep furrows, stretched away from the avenue
on either side. The flower garden was a vegetable garden now, and the
artichokes and the cabbages and the broccoli were planted with
mathematical regularity up to the very walls. There were hens and
chickens on the steps and running in and out of the open door, and from
a near sty the grunt of many pigs reached her ears. A pale,
earthy-skinned peasant, scantily clad in dusty canvas, grinned sadly and
kissed the hem of her skirt, calling her 'Excellency' and beginning at
once to beg for reduction of rent. A field-worn woman, filthy and
dishevelled, drove back half a dozen nearly naked children whose little
legs were crusted with dry mud, and whose faces had not been washed for
a long time.

And within, there was no furniture. In the rooms upstairs were stores of
grain and potatoes, and red peppers and grapes hanging on strings. The
cracked mirrors, built into the gilded stucco, were coated with heavy
unctuous dust, and the fine old painted tiles on the floor were loose
and broken in places. In the ceiling certain pink and well-fed cherubs
still supported unnatural thunderclouds through which Juno forever drove
her gold-wheeled car and team of patient peacocks, smiling high and
goddess-like at the squalor beneath. Still Diana bent over Endymion
cruelly foreshortened in his sleep, beyond the possibility of a waking
return to human proportions. Mars frowned, Jove threatened, Venus rose
glowing from the sea; and below, the unctuous black dust settled and
thickened on everything except the cracked floors piled with maize and
beans and lupins, and rubbed bright between the heaps by the peasants'
naked feet.

Veronica turned her back upon the villa, as she had turned from the
great palace in the Toledo. They whispered to her that the peasant's
rent must not be reduced, for he w