him first: she
was his first love.' The Alps, and the sense of having Italy below them,
renewed Cecilia's lofty-perching youth. Then--I am in Italy! she sighed
with rapture. The wine of delight and oblivion was at her lips.

But thirst is not enjoyment, and a satiated thirst that we insist on
over-satisfying to drown the recollection of past anguish, is baneful to
the soul. In Rome Cecilia's vision of her track to Rome was of a run of
fire over a heath. She could scarcely feel common pleasure in Rome. It
seemed burnt out.

Flung back on herself, she was condemned to undergo the bitter torment
she had flown from: jealous love, and reproachful; and a shame in it like
nothing she had yet experienced. Previous pains were but Summer
lightnings, passing shadows. She could have believed in sorcery: the man
had eaten her heart!

A disposition to mocking humour, foreign to her nature, gave her the
notion of being off her feet, in the claws of a fabulous bird. It served
to veil her dulness. An ultra-English family in Rome, composed, shocking
to relate, of a baronet banker and his wife, two faint-faced girls, and a
young gentleman of our country, once perhaps a light-limbed boy, chose to
be followed by their footman in the melancholy pomp of state livery.
Wherever she encountered them Cecilia talked Nevil Beauchamp. Even Mr.
Tuckham perceived it. She was extremely uncharitable: she extended her
ungenerous criticism to the institution of the footman: England, and the
English, were lashed.

'These people are caricatures,' Tuckham said, in apology for poor England
burlesqued abroad. 'You must not generalize on them. Footmen are footmen
all the world over. The cardinals have a fine set of footmen.'

'They are at home. Those English sow contempt of us all over Europe. We
cannot but be despised. One comes abroad foredoomed to share the
sentiment. This is your middle-class! What society can they move in, that
sanctions a vulgarity so perplexing? They have the air of ornaments on a
cottager's parlour mantelpiece.'

Tuckham laughed. 'Something of that,' he said.

'Evidently they seek distinction, and they have it, of that kind,' she
continued. 'It is not wonderful that we have so much satirical writing in
England, with such objects of satire. It may be as little wonderful that
the satire has no effect. Immense wealth and native obtuseness combine to
disfigure us with this aspect of overripeness, not to say monstrosity. I
fall in lo