_ or _too
much_, just turns these folks' refinement into something its reverse.
People who cannot sleep because of the roseleaf in the sheets, or the
pea (like the little precious princess) under the mattress, are bad
sleepers, and had better do charing or climbing, or get pummelled by a
masseur till they grow healthier. And if ever I had the advising of
young folk with ambition to be aesthetic, I should conjure them to
cultivate their sensitiveness only to good things, and atrophy it
towards the inevitable bad; or rather I should teach them to push into
corners (or altogether get rid of) the irrelevant and trivial
impressions which so often are bound to accompany the most delightful
ones; very much as those occupants of the hotel room had done with
some of its furniture. What if an electric tram starts from the foot
of Giotto's tower, or if four-and-twenty Cook's tourists invade the
inn and streets of Verona? If you cannot extract some satisfaction
from the thought that there may be intelligent people even in a Cook's
party, and that the ugly tram takes hundreds of people up Fiesole
hill without martyrizing cab-horses--if you cannot do this (which
still is worth doing), overlook the Cook's tourists and the tram, blot
them out of your thoughts and feelings.

This question of _superfineness_ versus _refinement_ (which ought to
mean the power of refining things through our feeling) has carried me
away from the original theme of my discourse, which, under the symbol of
the hotel room, was merely that we should _perhaps appreciate more if we
were offered less to appreciate_. Apropos of this, I have long been
struck by the case of a dear Italian friend of mine, whose keenness of
perception and grip of judgment and unexpectedness of fancy is almost in
inverse proportion to her knowledge of books or opportunity of travel.
An invalid, cut off from much reading, and limited to monotonous
to-and-fro between a town which is not a great town and a hillside
village which is not a--not a great village; she is quite marvellously
delightful by her power of assimilating the little she can read and
observe, not merely of transmuting _it_ into something personal and
racy, but (what is much more surprising) of being modified harmoniously
by its assimilation; her rich and unexpected mind putting forth even
richer and more unexpected details. Whereas think of Tom, Dick, or
Harry, their natural good parts watered down with other folks' notion