Often I Walked Thence With Her, In Those
Sparkling Mornings, Up The Palatine Hill, To Stroll About The Ilexes And
Roses In View Of The Forum, To Listen To The Blackbirds, Or The Siskins
In That Pine Tree.
She was of the same type, the same ethical parentage,
as the late Mathilde Blind, a woman of benignant and refined enthusiasm,
full of charity to the poor and, in those later days, almost
shadowy - remote from earth.
She had saturated herself with Rome, for
whose name she professed a tremulous affection untainted by worldly
considerations such as mine; she loved its "persistent spiritual life";
it was her haven of rest. So, while her arm rested lightly on mine, we
wandered about those gardens, the saintly lady and myself; her mind
dwelling, maybe, on memories of that one classic love-adventure and the
part she came nigh to playing in the history of Europe, while mine was
lost in a maze of vulgar love-adventures, several of which came nigh to
making me play a part in the police-courts of Rome.
What may have helped to cement our strange friendship was my
acquaintance, at that time, with the German metaphysicians. She must
have thought me a queer kind of Englishman to discuss with such
familiarity the tenets of these cloudy dreamers. Malwida loved them in a
bland and childlike fashion. She would take one of their dicta as a
starting-point - establish herself, so to speak, within this or that
nebular hypothesis - and argue thence in academic fashion for the sake of
intellectual exercise and the joy of seeing where, after a thousand
twists and turnings, you were finally deposited.
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