to you: one breathes it in, and it is
there ever after, but remains unset to words.

The T----s whittle themselves out of our company just to the right
amount: come back at the right time (which is more than Arthur and I are
likely to do when our legs get on the spin), and are duly welcome with a
diversity of doings to talk about. Their tastes are more the M.-A.'s,
and their activities about halfway between hers and ours, so we make
rather a fortunate quintette. The M---- trio join us the day after
to-morrow, when the majority of us will head away at once to Florence.
Arthur growls and threatens he means to be left behind for a week: and
it suits the funny little jealousy of the M.-A. well enough to see us
parted for a time, quite apart from the fact that I shall then be more
dependent on her company. She will then glory in overworking
herself,--say it is me; and I shall feel a fiend. No letter at all,
dearest, this; merely talky-talky.--Yours without words.

LETTER XXX.

Dearest: I cannot say I have seen Pisa, for the majority had
their way, and we simply skipped into it, got ourselves bumped down at
the Duomo and Campo Santo for two hours, fell exhausted to bed, and
skipped out again by the first train next morning. Over the walls of the
Campo Santo are some divine crumbs of Benozzo Gozzoli (don't expect me
ever to spell the names of dead painters correctly: it is a politeness
one owes to the living, but the famous dead are exalted by being spelt
phonetically as the heart dictates, and become all the better company
for that greatest of unspelled and spread-about names--Shakspere,
Shakspeare, Shakespeare--his mark, not himself). Such a long parenthesis
requires stepping-stones to carry you over it: "crumbs" was the last
(wasn't a whole loaf of bread a stepping-stone in one of Andersen's
fairy-tales?): but, indeed, I hadn't time to digest them properly. Let
me come back to them before I die, and bury me in that inclosure if you
love me as much then as I think you do now.

The Baptistry has a roof of echoes that is wonderful,--a mirror of sound
hung over the head of an official who opens his mouth for centimes to
drop there. You sing notes up into it (or rather you don't, for that is
his perquisite), and they fly circling, and flock, and become a single
chord stretching two octaves: till you feel that you are living inside
what in the days of our youth would have been called "the sound of a
grand Amen."

Th