to make her first acquaintance with the city for which she had lon

ven her the illusion of a city of an ideal antiquity, an ideal Renascence; and she had forgotten that, especially in Rome, life has progressed pitilessly and t

Column a column like any other; she had not noticed the Forum as she drove past it

er father, mother, brothers and sisters, of whom she had taken leave for a long time to go abroad. Her father, a retired colonel of hussars living on his pension, with no great private means, had been unable to contribute anything to the fulfilment of her caprice, as he c

the knack of creating an apparently new frock out of an old dress, transforming a last year's hat into one of the latest fashion. Even so she had now done with her distraught and wretched life, all battered and broken as it was; she had gathered together, as in a fit of economy, all that was left, all that was still serviceable; and out of those remnants she had made herself a new existence. But this new life was unable to breathe in the old atmosphere: it felt aimless in

an unconscious vitality, notwithstanding any apparent weakness. And her contradict

room, with its air of quickly improvised comfort, a comfort which was a matter of tact rather than reality and could be packed away in a single trunk. Her frail figure, her pale and delicate rather than beautiful features were surrounded, as by an aura, by that atmosphere of personal poetry which she unconsciously radiated, which she shed from her eyes upon the things which she beheld, from her fingers upon the things which she touched. To those who did not like her, this peculiar atmosphere, this unusualness, this eccentricity, this unlikeness to the typical young woman of

her, with its sombre streets, its dead palaces and she had yearned for Rome. But she had not found Rome yet that afternoon. And, though she felt tired, she felt above all things lonely, terribly lonely and useless in a great world, in a great town, a town in which one feel

er room, there was no light to read by, she was too much enervated to ring for a lamp; a chilliness hovered in her little room, now that the sun had quite gone down, and she had forgotten to ask for a fire on that first day. Lonelines

ell me wh