llorbes continue during her
visit to Florence and upon her onward way to Perugia. But there
self-admiration ceased to be all-sufficient for her. She needed to read
confirmation of that admiration in other eyes. And the gray Etruscan
city, uplifted on its star-shaped hill, offered her a somewhat grim
reception. Piercing winds swept across the Tiber valley from the still
snow-clad Apennines above Assisi. The austere, dark-walled,
lombard-gothic churches and palaces showed forbidding, merciless
almost, through the driving wet. Even in fair summer weather suspicion
of ancient and implacable terror lurks in the shadow of those cyclopean
gateways, and stalks over the unyielding, rock-hewn pavements of those
solemn mediaeval streets. There was an incalculable element in Perugia
which raised a certain anger in Helen. The place seemed to defy her and
make light of her pretensions. As during the siege of Paris, so now,
echoes of the eternal laughter saluted her ears, ironic in tone.

Nor was the society offered by the residents in the hotel,
weather-bound like herself, of a specially enlivening description. It
was composed almost exclusively of middle-aged English and American
ladies--widows and spinsters--of blameless morals and anxiously active
intelligence. They wrapped their lean forms in woolen shawls and
ill-cut jackets. They pervaded salon and corridors guide-book in hand.
They discoursed of Umbrian antiquities, Etruscan tombs, frescoes and
architecture. Having but little life in themselves, they tried, rather
vainly, to warm both hands at the fire of the life of the past. Among
them, Helen, in her vigorous and self-secure, though fine-drawn,
beauty, was about as much at home as a young panther in a hen-roost.
They admired, they vaguely feared, they greatly wondered at her. Had
one of those glorious young gallants, Baglioni or Oddi, clothed in
scarlet, winged, helmeted, sword on thigh, as Perugino has painted them
on the walls of the Sala del Cambio--very strangest union of sensuous
worldliness and radiant arch-angelic grace--had one of these
magnificent gentlemen ruffled into the hotel parlour, he could hardly
have startled the eyes, and perplexed the understanding, of the
virtuous and learned Anglo-Saxon and Transatlantic feminine beings
there assembled, more than did Madame de Vallorbes.

For all such sexless creatures, for the great company of women in whose
outlook man plays no immediate or active part, Helen had, in