If I Would Favor Him Through His Back Shop He
Would Show Me How Close I Was Upon It; And From His Threshold He Pointed
To The Corner Twenty Yards Off, Which, When I Had Turned It, Left Me
Almost At My Own Door.
In that transmuted Rome Via del Gambero, at least, was wholly unchanged,
and there was not a wrinkle in the front of the house where we had
sojourned so comfortably, so contentedly, in our incredible youth.
I had
not quite the courage to ring and ask if we were at home; but, standing
across the way and looking up at the window, it seemed to me that I
might have seen my own young face peering out in a somewhat suspicious
question of the old eyes staring up so fixedly at it. Who was I, and
what was I doing there? Was I waiting, hanging idly about, to see the
Armenian archbishop coming to carry my other self in his red coach to
the Sistine Chapel, where we were to hear Pius IX. say mass? There was
no harm in my hanging about, but the street was narrow and there was a
chance of my being ground up by some passing cart against the wall there
behind me if I was not careful. I could not tell my proud young double
that we were one, and that I was going in the archbishop's red coach as
well; he would never have believed it of my gray hairs and sunken
figure.
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