right things upon the shelves--decanters and
tumblers, and blue plates, and one red rose in a glass of water. The
furniture was old-fashioned and stiff. Everything was in keeping, down
to the ponderous leaden inkstand on the round table. And you may fancy
how pleasant it looked all flushed and flickered over by the light of a
brisk companionable fire, and seen, in a strange, tilted sort of
perspective, in the three compartments of the old mirror above the
chimney. As I sat reading in the great arm-chair, I kept looking round
with the tail of my eye at the quaint, bright picture that was about me,
and could not help some pleasure and a certain childish pride in forming
part of it. The book I read was about Italy in the early Renaissance,
the pageantries and the light loves of princes, the passion of men for
learning, and poetry, and art; but it was written, by good luck, after a
solid, prosaic fashion, that suited the room infinitely more nearly than
the matter; and the result was that I thought less, perhaps, of Lippo
Lippi, or Lorenzo, or Politian, than of the good Englishman who had
written in that volume what he knew of them, and taken so much pleasure
in his solemn polysyllables.

I was not left without society. My landlord had a very pretty little
daughter whom we shall call Lizzie. If I had made any notes at the time,
I might be able to tell you something definite of her appearance. But
faces have a trick of growing more and more spiritualised and abstract
in the memory, until nothing remains of them but a look, a haunting
expression; just that secret quality in a face that is apt to slip out
somehow under the cunningest painter's touch, and leave the portrait
dead for the lack of it. And if it is hard to catch with the finest of
camel's hair pencils, you may think how hopeless it must be to pursue
after it with clumsy words. If I say, for instance, that this look,
which I remember as Lizzie, was something wistful that seemed partly to
come of slyness and in part of simplicity, and that I am inclined to
imagine it had something to do with the daintiest suspicion of a cast in
one of her large eyes, I shall have said all that I can, and the reader
will not be much advanced towards comprehension. I had struck up an
acquaintance with this little damsel in the morning, and professed much
interest in her dolls, and an impatient desire to see the large one
which was kept locked away for great occasions. And so I had not