Better Even Than This
Most Amiable Circle, Or Half-Circle, Of Father, Mother, And Daughter Are
The Figures Of Friends Or Acquaintances Or Kinsfolk:
Figures not only
life-size, but full-length, in panels of the walls, in the very act of
stepping on the floor and coming forward to greet their host and hostess
from the other walls.
They did not visibly move during our stay, but I
know they only waited for us to go; and that at night, especially when
there was a moon, or none, they left their backgrounds and mingled in
the polite gayeties of their period. One could hardly help looking over
one's shoulder to see if they were not following to that farthermost
room called Primavera, which is painted around and aloft like a very
bower of spring, with foliage and flowers covering the walls and
dropping through the trellis feigned overhead. Of all the caprices of
art, which in Italy so loved caprice, I recall no such pleasing
playfulness as in the decoration of these rooms. If you pass through
the last you may look from the spring within on no fairer spring without
bordering the shores of the Campagna sea.
It was so pathetic to imagine the place going out of the right Italian
keeping that I attributed a responsive sadness to the tall, handsome,
elderly woman who had allowed us the freedom of the casino. Her faded
beauty was a little sallow, as the faded beauty of a Roman matron should
be, and her large, dark eyes glowed from purpling shadows.
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