ce and the spontaneous gaiety of the people as they trooped
out into the piazza afterwards. It had occurred to her, watching the
devout worshippers, that Catholicism was in some of its aspects a
strange medium for the spiritual interpretation of the blithe Italian
genius. What did Mr. Crevequer think?

Mr. Crevequer thought, but did not say, that she might have been more
profitably employed in attending to the service than in watching the
devout worshippers.

Mrs. Venables' niece, Prudence Varley, talked about Naples, with a
certain careful accentuation of the purely ordinary point of view of the
cultivated seer of sights. Her cousin Warren, watching her, smiled
inwardly at the accentuation. He understood it perfectly well. There was
in it a certain quality of externality that gained edge from the
contrast with Mrs. Venables' all-reaching intimacy. It revealed, anyhow,
how the Crevequers wallowed in ignorance--how they knew nothing.
Museums, mosaics, pictures, sculpture, were to them less than names.
Churches they knew only in so far as they went to church in them; and it
was not from the point of view of one interested in worship, but in
architecture, that Miss Varley seemed to approach the subject, differing
herein from her aunt. When she discovered that the Crevequers knew
nothing, she did not follow the subject; she gently fell again into her
non-conversational attitude, which seemed almost a little abstracted.
(She had often that air.) The Crevequers had indeed their own knowledge
of Naples--none more so; but it was the intimacy of streets and corners,
that close acquaintance with the face of a city which belongs to those
who, as Warren Venables had said, 'drift about the bottom.' How should
they know of mosaics? They knew every little narrow _gradone_, shut in
with leaning houses, that led steeply up out of all the length of the
Toledo, from Piazza San Carlo to the doors of the museum. (Beyond the
doors their ignorance began.) They knew at what hour on Friday mornings
it was most amusing to be playing round Porta Nolana; they knew the
price at which you can get a plate of macaroni and a mezzo-litro of wine
at all the _trattorie_ (of any economy) in Naples, and at which you were
most likely to meet amusing acquaintances, and at what hours. But it was
possible that Miss Varley felt no more curiosity as to these things than
the Crevequers as to the Angevin tombs in Santa Chiara. In Naples there
seemed to be no meeti