minia found herself installed in a dingy flat, in a
morose palazzo, in the main street of the city, she was glad that
Alan insisted on going out alone to make needful purchases of
groceries and provisions, because it gave her a chance of flinging
herself on her bed in a perfect agony of distress and disappointment,
and having a good cry, all alone, at the aspect of the home where
she was to pass so many eventful weeks of her existence.

Dusty, gusty Perugia! O baby, to be born for the freeing of woman,
was it here, was it here you must draw your first breath, in an air
polluted by the vices of centuries!

XI.

Somewhat later in the day, they went out for a stroll through the
town together. To Herminia's great relief, Alan never even noticed
she had been crying. Man-like, he was absorbed in his own delight.
She would have felt herself a traitor if Alan had discovered it.

"Which way shall we go?" she asked listlessly, with a glance to
right and left, as they passed beneath the sombre Tuscan gate of
their palazzo.

And Alan answered, smiling, "Why, what does it matter? Which way
you like. Every way is a picture."

And so it was, Herminia herself was fain to admit, in a pure
painter's sense that didn't at all attract her. Lines grouped
themselves against the sky in infinite diversity. Whichever way
they turned quaint old walls met their eyes, and tumble-down
churches, and mouldering towers, and mediaeval palazzi with carved
doorways or rich loggias. But whichever way they turned dusty
roads too confronted them, illimitable stretches of gloomy suburb,
unwholesome airs, sickening sights and sounds and perfumes. Narrow
streets swept, darkling, under pointed archways, that framed
distant vistas of spire or campanile, silhouetted against the solid
blue sky of Italy. The crystal hardness of that sapphire firmament
repelled Herminia. They passed beneath the triumphal arch of
Augustus with its Etruscan mason-work, its Roman decorations, and
round the antique walls, aglow with tufted gillyflowers, to the
bare Piazza d'Armi. A cattle fair was going on there; and Alan
pointed with pleasure to the curious fact that the oxen were all
cream-colored,--the famous white steers of Clitumnus. Herminia
knew her Virgil as well as Alan himself, and murmured half aloud
the sonorous hexameter, "Romanos ad templa deum duxere triumphos."
But somehow, the knowledge that these were indeed the milk-white
bullocks of Clitu