rs at the doors of highly-decorated villas, amiably
performing their tasks while the mighty slept; fishermen and fat
fisher-girls, industriously repairing endless brown nets on the other
side of the parapet of the road; a postman and a little policeman; a
porcelain mender, who practised his trade under the shadow of the wall; a
few loafers; some stable-boys exercising horses; and children with
adorable dirty faces, shouting in their high treble as they played at
hopscotch. I felt very closely akin to these meek ones as we walked
along. They were so human, so wistful. They had the wonderful simplicity
of animals, uncomplicated by the disease of self-consciousness; they were
the vital stuff without the embroidery. They preserved the customs of
their ancestors, rising with the sun, frankly and splendidly enjoying the
sun, looking up to it as the most important thing in the world. They
never attempted to understand what was beyond them; they troubled not
with progress, ideals, righteousness, the claims of society. They
accepted humbly and uninquiringly what they found. They lived the life of
their instincts, sometimes violent, often kindly, and always natural.
Why should I have felt so near to them?

A calm and gentle pleasure filled me, far from intense, but yet
satisfying. I determined to enjoy the moment, or, perhaps, without
determination, I gave myself up, gradually, to the moment. I forgot care
and sorrow. I was well; I was with Frank; I was in the midst of
enchanting natural beauty; the day was fair and fresh and virgin. I knew
not where I was going. Shorewards a snowy mountain ridge rose above the
long, wide slopes of olives, dotted with white dwellings. A single sail
stood up seawards on the immense sheet of blue. The white sail appeared
and disappeared in the green palm-trees as we passed eastwards. Presently
we left the sea, and we lost the hills, and came into a street of poor
little shops for simple folk, that naively exposed their cheap and tawdry
goods to no matter what mightiness should saunter that way. And then we
came to the end of the tram-line, and it was like the end of the world.
And we saw in the distance abodes of famous persons, fabulously rich,
defying the sea and the hills, and condescending from afar off to the
humble. We crossed the railway, and a woman ran out from a cabin with a
spoon in one hand and a soiled flag in the other, and waved the flag at
a towering black engine that breathed sterto