irls were running to and from the kitchen in a building apart
with shrill, sweet promises of haste. The morning sun fell broken
through the leaves on the gay hats and dresses of the ladies, and
dappled the figures of the men with harlequin patches of light and
shade. A tall woman, with a sort of sharpened beauty, and an artificial
permanency of tint in her cheeks and yellow hair, came trailing
herself up the sun-shot path, and found, with hardy insistence upon the
publicity, places for the surly-looking, down-faced young man behind
her, and for her maid and her black poodle; the dog was like the black
poodle out of Faust. Burnamy had heard her history; in fact, he had
already roughed out a poem on it, which he called Europa, not after the
old fable, but because it seemed to him that she expressed Europe, on
one side of its civilization, and had an authorized place in its order,
as she would not have had in ours. She was where she was by a toleration
of certain social facts which corresponds in Europe to our reverence
for the vested interests. In her history there, had been officers and
bankers; even foreign dignitaries; now there was this sullen young
fellow.... Burnamy had wondered if it would do to offer his poem to
March, but the presence of the original abashed him, and in his mind he
had torn the poem up, with a heartache for its aptness.

"I don't believe," he said, "that I recognize-any celebrities here."

"I'm sorry," said March. "Mrs. March would have been glad of some
Hoheits, some Grafs and Grafins, or a few Excellenzes, or even some mere
well-borns. But we must try to get along with the picturesqueness."

"I'm satisfied with the picturesqueness," said his wife. "Don't worry
about me, Mr. Burnamy."

"Why can't we have this sort of thing at home?"

"We're getting something like it in the roof-gardens," said March. "We
couldn't have it naturally because the climate is against it, with us.
At this time in the morning over there, the sun would be burning the
life out of the air, and the flies would be swarming on every table. At
nine A. M. the mosquitoes would be eating us up in such a grove as this.
So we have to use artifice, and lift our Posthof above the fly-line and
the mosquito-line into the night air. I haven't seen a fly since I came
to Europe. I really miss them; it makes me homesick."

"There are plenty in Italy," his wife suggested.

"We must get down there before we go home."

"But why did nob