centres, burning with a strange lavender flame, as she had seen some
metal burn lilac-flamed in the laboratory of the hospital at
Islington. All down the oak-dry bankside they burned their great
exposed stars. And she felt like going down on her knees and bending
her forehead to the earth in an oriental submission, they were so
royal, so lovely, so supreme. She came again to them in the morning,
when the sky was grey, and they were closed, sharp clubs,
wonderfully fragile on their stems of sap, among leaves and old
grass and wild periwinkle. They had wonderful dark stripes running
up their cheeks, the crocuses, like the clear proud stripes on a
badger's face, or on some proud cat. She took a handful of the
sappy, shut, striped flames. In her room they opened into a grand
bowl of lilac fire.

March was a lovely month. The men were busy in the hills. She
wandered, extending her range. Sometimes with a strange fear. But it
was a fear of the elements rather than of man. One day she went
along the high-road with her letters, towards the village of Casa
Latina. The high-road was depressing, wherever there were houses.
For the houses had that sordid, ramshackle, slummy look almost
invariable on an Italian high-road. They were patched with a
hideous, greenish mould-colour, blotched, as if with leprosy. It
frightened her, till Pancrazio told her it was only the copper
sulphate that had sprayed the vines hitched on to the walls. But
none the less the houses were sordid, unkempt, slummy. One house by
itself could make a complete slum.

Casa Latina was across the valley, in the shadow. Approaching it
were rows of low cabins--fairly new. They were the one-storey
dwellings commanded after the earthquake. And hideous they were. The
village itself was old, dark, in perpetual shadow of the mountain.
Streams of cold water ran round it. The piazza was gloomy, forsaken.
But there was a great, twin-towered church, wonderful from outside.

She went inside, and was almost sick with repulsion. The place was
large, whitewashed, and crowded with figures in glass cases and ex
voto offerings. The lousy-looking, dressed-up dolls, life size and
tinselly, that stood in the glass cases; the blood-streaked Jesus on
the crucifix; the mouldering, mumbling, filthy peasant women on
their knees; all the sense of trashy, repulsive, degraded
fetish-worship was too much for her. She hurried out, shrinking from
the contamination of the dirty leather door-c