y would rather be teased a little and smoked over a good deal
by a man whom I could look up to and be proud of, than have my feet
kissed all day by a Mr. Smith in boots and a waistcoat, and thereby
chiefly distinguished. Neither I nor another, perhaps, had quite a
right to expect a combination of qualities, such as meet, though, in
my husband, who is as faultless and pure in his private life as any
Mr. Smith of them all, who would not owe five shillings, who lives
like a woman in abstemiousness on a pennyworth of wine a day, never
touches a cigar even.... Do you hear, as we do, from Mr. Forster, that
his[164] new poem is his best work? As soon as you read it, let me
have your opinion. The subject seems almost identical with one of
Chaucer's. Is it not so? We have spent here the most delightful of
summers, notwithstanding the heat, and I begin to comprehend the
possibility of St. Lawrence's ecstasies on the gridiron. Very hot it
certainly has been and is, yet there have been cool intermissions; and
as we have spacious and airy rooms, and as Robert lets me sit all day
in my white dressing gown without a single masculine criticism, and
as we can step out of the window on a sort of balcony terrace which is
quite private and swims over with moonlight in the evenings, and as
we live upon water melons and iced water and figs and all manner of
fruit, we bear the heat with an angelic patience and felicity which
really are edifying. We tried to make the monks of Vallombrosa let
us stay with them for two months, but their new abbot said or
implied that Wilson and I stank in his nostrils, being women, and San
Gualberto, the establishes of their order, had enjoined on them only
the mortification of cleaning out pigsties without fork or shovel.
So here a couple of women besides was (as Dickens's American said) 'a
piling it up rayther too mountainious.' So we were sent away at the
end of five days. So provoking! Such scenery, such hills, such a
sea of hills looking alive among the clouds. _Which_ rolled, it was
difficult to discern. Such pine woods, supernaturally silent, with the
ground black as ink, such chestnut and beech forests hanging from the
mountains, such rocks and torrents, such chasms and ravines. There
were eagles there, too, [and] there was _no road_. Robert went on
horseback, and Flush, Wilson, and I were drawn in a sledge (i.e.
an old hamper, a basket wine hamper without a wheel) by two white
bullocks up the precipitous