The Roof, Which Had
Been So Popular And Populous In The Morning, Was Now So Little Envied
That A Fat Lady Descended From It And Wedged Herself Into A Row Of The
Interior Where A Sylph Would Have Fitted Better But Might Not Have Added
So Much To The Warmth.
No one, myself of the number, thought of getting
up, though there were plenty of straps to hang by if one had chosen to
stand.
This was quite like home, and so was it like home to have the
conductor ask me to Avait for my change, with all the ensuing fears that
wronged the long-delayed remembrance of his debt. In some things it
appears that at Rome the Romans do as the Americans do, but I wish we
were like them in having such a place as Frascati within easy tram-reach
of our cities.
XV
A FEW REMAINING MOMENTS
In the days of the earlier sixties, we youth who wished to be thought
elect did not feel ourselves so unless we were deeply read in
Hawthorne's romance of _The Marble Faun._ We made that our aesthetic
handbook in Rome, and we devoutly looked up all the places mentioned in
it, which were important for being mentioned; though such places as the
Tarpeian Rock, the Forum, the Capitoline Museum, and the Villa Bor-ghese
might secondarily have their historical or artistic interest. In like
manner Story's statue of Cleopatra was to be seen, because it was the
"original" of the imaginary sculptor Kenyon's Cleopatra, and a certain
mediaeval tower was sacred because it was universally identified as the
tower where the heroine Hilda lived dreaming and drawing, and fed the
doves that circled around its top.
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