rdi 13, Firenze; Bianchi, Via Mazzini 12, Lucca; Fratelli
Masai, Via Manzoni, Pisa. And everywhere the recurrent word--_Antichita_.

How she hated the word!--how she hated the associations linked with it,
and with the names on the boxes. They were bound up with a score of
humbling memories, the memories of her shabby, struggling youth. She
thought of her father--the needy English artist, Robert Smeath, with just
a streak, and no more than a streak, of talent, who had become rapidly
"Italianate" in the Elizabethan sense--had dropped, that is, the English
virtues, without ever acquiring the Italian. He had married her mother, a
Florentine girl, the daughter of a small _impiegato_ living in one of the
dismal new streets leading out of Florence on the east, and had then
pursued a shifting course between the two worlds, the English and the
Italian, ordering his household and bringing up his children in Italian
fashion, while he was earning his keep and theirs, not at all by the
showy pictures in his studio which no one would buy, but as jackal in
_antichita_, to the richer English and American tourists. He kept a
greedy eye on the artistic possessions still remaining in the hands of
impoverished native owners; he knew the exact moment of debt and
difficulty in which to bring a foreign gold to bear; he was an adept in
all the arts by which officials are bribed, and pictures are smuggled.
And sometimes these accomplishments of his resulted in large accessions
of cash, so that all the family lived on the fat of the land, bought
gorgeous attire, and went to Livorno, or Viareggio, or the Adriatic
coast, for the summer. And sometimes there was no luck, and therefore
no money. Owners became unkindly patriotic and would not sell. Or some
promising buyer, after nibbling for months, went off finally unhooked.
Then the apartment in the Via Giugno showed the stress of hard times. The
girls wore their old clothes to rags; the mother did all the work of the
house in a bedgown and slippers; and the door of the apartment was never
opened more than a few inches to any applicant, lest creditors should get
in.

And the golden intervals got fewer, and the poverty more persistent, as
the years went on. Till at last, by the providence--or malice--of the
gods, a rich and apparently prodigal Englishman, Edmund Melrose, hungry
for _antichita_ of all sorts, arrived on the scene. Smeath became rapidly
the bond-slave of Melrose, in the matter of works