It Was Fitfully
Put On And Off During The Chilly Week That Ensued, Though In Our
Fifth-Story Garden, To Which We Sometimes Resorted, There Was A Mildness
In The Air That Was Absent In-Doors.
The hotel itself was disappointing;
any hotel would be after our hotel in Leghorn; and, though there was the
good-will of former days, there was not the former effect.
The corridors
crashed and clattered all day long and well into the night with the
gayety of some cheap incursion of German tourists, who seemed, indeed,
to fill the whole city with their clamor. They were given a long table
to themselves, and when they were set at it and began to ply their
knives and tongues the din was deafening. That would not have been so
bad if they had not been so plain, or if, when they happened, in a young
girl or two, to be pretty, they had not guttled and guzzled so like the
plainest of their number. One such pretty girl was really beautiful,
with a bloom perhaps already too rich, which, as she abandoned herself
to her meat and drink, reddened downward over her lily neck and upward
to her golden hair, past the brows under which her blue, blue eyes
protruded painfully, all in a frightful prophecy of what she would be
when the bud of her spring should be the full-blown cabbage-rose of her
summer.
I dare say those people were not typical of their civilization.
Enter page number
PreviousNext
Page 320 of 353
Words from 87960 to 88211
of 97259
